Singer on Moral Duties

Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher who gained public notoriety for his views on the morality of infanticide, has written a book in which he argues that we have a duty to help the poor around the world. The book is titled The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty and an interview with Singer about his book is summarized at The Philosopher's Magazine(TPM).

Throughout the summary we read statements made by Singer like:

[W]e should accept the deceptively uncontroversial-sounding principle that "if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it."

"I and everyone else in similar circumstances ought to give as much as possible, that is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one would begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and one's dependents - perhaps even beyond this point to the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more one would cause oneself and one's dependents as much suffering as one would prevent in Bengal."

"I want to persuade as many people as possible to do something about world poverty."

"Most people can give 50% of their income away. I wouldn't say they can't, it's predictable that most of them won't, but I think in the sense that 'ought implies can', they can."

"If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought to do it."

"If you're thinking ethically you ought to try to take this point of view from which you consider whether you could prescribe the action if you were in the position of all of those affected by it. I think that if you consider the situation of poverty and affluence, if you were really to put yourself in the position of the poor person and the affluent person, and ask yourself whether you could support the view that the affluent person doesn't give anything to the poor, you couldn't."

Put simply, Singer believes we have a duty to help the poor, and his book is an attempt to answer objections to his belief that we should give away far more of our wealth than we do to ameliorate the world's suffering. Perhaps we should but this is a very peculiar claim for someone of Peter Singer's metaphysical commitments to make because Singer is an atheist.

Singer seems to assume that everyone agrees with him that we have a moral obligation to help the poor and that the only question concerns the extent of the help we should give. But the fundamental question, as we have written about often here at Viewpoint, is where does an atheist get the notion that we have any moral duties at all?

Duties and obligations are imposed upon us, either by ourselves or by a higher authority. If the duty to help the poor is self-imposed then how can Singer say that anyone but himself ought to give of their resources? If the duty to help the poor is self-imposed then it is purely subjective and arbitrary and is no more rational, probably less so, than imposing a duty upon oneself to be selfish.

If the obligation to minimize suffering is imposed by a higher authority than our individual selves then we need to ask Mr. Singer what that higher authority is. Could it be the state? If the state is to be our moral arbiter then whatever duty the state imposes is right, but surely Mr. Singer doesn't think this is true. It doesn't take too much imagination to picture a state imposing the duty to commit genocide, as some Islamic states would do if given half the chance and which Germany did do in the late thirties and early forties.

This is one of several fundamental quandaries an atheist finds himself in. The only non-arbitrary, objective authority which has the power and the right to impose moral duties upon us is God. For an atheist to talk about our responsibility to the poor and our obligation to give to them until it hurts is simply nonsense. Unless God wills it, which He does, I have no moral obligation to do anything I don't want to do.

Someone may object and say, "but if you were poor you would want the better off to help you." That's certainly true, but it's no reason at all why I should help others. The objection invokes the Golden Rule and admonishes us to abide by it, but what reason is there why we should? Why should I simply not live by the rule that says "Look out for #1?"

To this question the atheist has no answer, and Singer's moralizing about duties to the poor is at bottom just so much hand-waving.

RLC

El Dorado?

Those readers with an interest in archaeology will find this article interesting. Apparently, deforestation of the Amazon basin has allowed satellites to detect the remnants of an ancient civilization that dates back to 800 A.D. Some archaeologists suspect it may be the remains of the mythical city of El Dorado.

The article doesn't mention this, but I wonder what the ecological implications are for those of us disheartened by the steady loss of the rain forest biome. What I mean is if an entire city, stretching for 150 miles, was carved out of the forest and then reclaimed by the forest when the civilization died, is it possible that portions of the rain forest could likewise recover some of their former beauty and vigor if those parts which have been destroyed in the last century were allowed to regrow?

Perhaps the loss of the rain forest is not permanent. Tragically, though, the extinction of any species which die out because of habitat loss is.

RLC

Sinking Ship

Gary Varvel comments upon the wisdom of the Democrats' plan for adding several million more people to our health insurance system:

A picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

RLC

Thwarting Terror Attacks in Israel

Strategy Page has an interesting article on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in which it's noted that Israel suffered no Islamic terror attacks within its borders in 2009 - the lowest level of Islamic terrorism in Israel since the Palestinians began their current round of violence in 2000.

Several reasons for this respite are the new tactics adopted by the Israelis to defeat the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign as well as their flexibility in adapting to new Palestinian methods:

The Palestinian terrorist groups still say they are going to destroy Israel. But as a practical matter, the current round of Palestinian terrorist violence is over. You can see this by the sharp decline in successful terrorist attacks, and the frequent pronouncements from the terrorists groups that they are going to behave, for a while anyway (until they can figure out how to bypass Israeli defenses).

What the terrorists really want is to avoid any more of the Israeli tactics that shut down their terrorist operations. This included going after terrorist leaders and technical specialists, and either capturing or (failing that) killing them. Raids and air attacks were made against buildings used by the terrorists, and tight security on Israelis borders were instituted. This last measure crushed the Palestinian economy, which put popular pressure on the terrorists to stop their attacks, and promise to keep it that way. That hasn't worked, but Israeli counter-terror techniques continue to.

In addition to these tactics Israel has established a very effective intelligence-gathering network in Gaza that allows them to preempt terrorist designs. Police states like Egypt, Algeria and Syria have crushed indigenous terrorist movements within their borders at great cost to innocent bystanders, but it's much harder for a free and open society to extinguish a terrorist threat.

One question this raises is whether the Israeli people would stand for their leaders forfeiting the relative peace they've achieved in order to launch a risky attack on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Such an attack is almost certain to result in war with both Hamas and Hezbollah. But then war with these radical groups dedicated to Israel's destruction is ultimately inevitable anyway.

RLC

Religious Intolerance

A number of commentators are in high dudgeon over Brit Hume's comment that Tiger Woods should embrace the redemption offered uniquely by the Gospel. Michael Gerson has a fine column in the Washington Post on the reaction to Hume's remark.

Gerson writes:

For this, Hume has been savaged. Post media critic Tom Shales put him in the category of a "sanctimonious busybody" engaged in "telling people what religious beliefs they ought to have." Blogger Andrew Sullivan criticized Hume's "pure sectarianism," which helps abolish "the distinction between secular and religious discourse." MSNBC's David Shuster called Hume's religious advice "truly embarrassing."

Criticism and insults from any of these three should be regarded as an affirmation that one is largely correct, but there's more here than just the prattle of bitter souls. Read the rest of Gerson's column and, meanwhile, let's pose some questions:

1) Would these gentlemen have been outraged had Hume been a Muslim and urged Woods to embrace Allah? Or if Hume were a Buddhist and Woods were not (he allegedly is) would anyone have objected had Hume encouraged Woods to find inner peace in the Buddhist faith? I doubt it. It's Hume's endorsement of Christianity that they find so offensive. Why?

2) Why is it wrong or embarrassing to encourage a man to adopt one's own faith? I can't say for sure, but it seems to me that the only answer to this question is that Hume believes something that they don't and has the temerity to take that belief seriously. If that's indeed what they find so offensive aren't they being awfully small-minded?

3) Why is advising someone to accept a particular religious belief any different than advising someone to accept a political doctrine? All three of these men endorse liberal dogmas everyday and implicitly or explicitly encourage others to accept those dogmas. How is that different than what Hume did?

4) Perhaps what lies at the root of their snit is the unspoken assumption that public figures shouldn't be talking about religion (unless it's Martin Luther King or Barack Obama doing the talking), but why not? What is it about religion, especially the Christian religion, that makes it illicit as a matter for public discussion?

I doubt any of these men that Gerson mentions could give a coherent answer to these questions. Their distaste at Hume's advice and their reaction to it is visceral rather than rational, witless rather than thoughtful. It's very sad.

Hume talks about this episode and the fallout from it in an interview at Christianity Today.

RLC

No More Mr. Nice Guy

Telic Thoughts links us to an essay in The Philosopher's Magazine by atheist Russell Blackford who urges a more outspoken and confrontational atheism. He wants atheists to challenge theistic belief more aggressively, the better to discredit it. Here are some excerpts from his column:

In the 1970s, or even the 1990s, it was possible to think religion had been declawed, and that further challenges to religious philosophies, institutions, and leaders were unnecessary. On this view, all the hard work had been done, and religion was withering away after the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, Darwin, and the social iconoclasm of the 1960s. Against that background, it became taboo to criticise religion in the public sphere; it was widely assumed that religion was retreating, in any event, and didn't need to be fought anymore. Attacks on people's "deeply-held beliefs" even smacked a little of cultural imperialism.

In the academy, bright minds in philosophy turned to other topics. Bright young atheists and sceptics were certainly not steered into philosophy of religion, which looked like an intellectual dead end.

But the situation now looks very different, even in the supposedly enlightened nations of the West. For a start, a revived Christian philosophy is well entrenched within Anglo-American philosophy of religion. More importantly, perhaps, religious organisations and leaders continue to exert social power. All too often, they seek to control how we plan and run our lives, including choices about how we die. At various times, religious lobbies have opposed a vast range of beneficial, or at least essentially harmless, activities and innovations. Even now, one religion or another opposes abortion rights; most contraceptive technologies; stem-cell and therapeutic cloning research; physician-assisted suicide; and a wide range of sexual conduct involving consenting adults. We still see intense activism from the religious lobbies of all Western democracies, and even in relatively secular countries, such as the UK and Australia, governments pander blatantly to Christian moral concerns.

It seems a little odd that Mr. Blackford considers abortion and physician-assisted suicide harmless. One might think that whether they're harmless or not depends upon whether one is doing the abortion or being aborted. In the next paragraph he makes claims that are no less peculiar:

The situation is far worse in the US, where religious conservatives regrouped with dramatic success during the 1970s and 1980s, establishing well-financed networks, think tanks, and even their own so-called universities. Slick attempts are made to undermine public trust in science where it contradicts the literal Genesis narrative; a rampant dominionist movement wants to establish an American theocracy; the recent Bush administration took the country some considerable way down that path; and the election of a relatively liberal president has produced hysteria on the religious right (polling shows that many American conservatives now believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist). American religiosity is real, and there is nothing subtle or liberal-minded about its most popular forms.

I have to say that I meet a lot of Christians and occasionally read some Christian literature, and maybe I'm not as in tune with what's going on as I should be, but I have never actually encountered one of these "dominionists" who wants to establish a theocracy in the U.S. Nor for the life of me do I see how it is that the Bush administration took us any distance at all down the path to such a state. Nor have I ever seen a poll that shows that "many" American conservatives perceive Mr. Obama to be the Antichrist. But even if all of this were true and amounted to something more substantial than the mental residue of Mr. Blackford's night terrors what does any of it have to do with the basic question of whether or not God exists?

He continues:

When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising - and totally justifiable - that atheists and sceptics question the source of this authority. If religious organisations or their leaders claim to speak on behalf of a god, it is fair to ask whether the god concerned really makes the claims that are communicated on its behalf. Does this god even exist? Where is the evidence?

This is ground I don't think Mr. Blackford really wants to tread. If we're going to be questioning the authority upon which claims in the political sphere are made then Mr. Blackford will have some answering to do as well. For instance, by what authority does an atheist like Mr. Blackford say that we have an obligation to care for the poor and/or the environment, if indeed he thinks we do? If Mr. Blackford thinks it wrong that some in our society don't have health care on what basis does he think it wrong? Indeed, on what authority does he imply that it's wrong for Christians to oppose embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, abortion, and same sex marriage or, for that matter, to promote a theocracy?

Mr. Blackford may not like any of these, but if atheism is true there's no authority by which he can judge any of them to be in some sense morally wrong. In a world without God right and wrong are determined by those who have the power to impose their will on others. Indeed, the only people who have the moral grounds to say that establishing a theocracy would be wrong are theists. The most an atheist can say is that he doesn't like theocracies and hopes we don't get one.

Mr. Blackford concludes with this:

In short, there is plenty of reason to challenge religions and contest their doctrinal claims, not just as an academic exercise, but as a matter of real urgency. Atheists and sceptics should deny the authority of religious organisations and leaders to pronounce on matters of ultimate truth and correct morality. This will require persistent, cool argument, but also moments of outright denunciation or even unashamed mockery of religion's most absurd actions and truth-claims.

We should never flinch from expressing the view that no religion has any rational warrant - that these Emperors really have no clothes - and that many churches and sects promote cruelty, misery, ignorance, and human rights abuses.

Well, I say to Mr. Blackford please do speak out publicly about your atheism. Let's have that debate. Let's examine the authority by which we make moral judgments and the reasons why we believe what we believe. Let's examine the historical record and compare the benefits Christianity has brought to the world against the contributions of atheism. I'm all in favor, but I think Mr. Blackford, once he considers how such a debate would really go, will probably think better of it. Most atheists do.

RLC

Promise-Breaker-in-Chief

C-Span president and founder Brian Lamb sent a letter to the White House last week asking that his television cameras be allowed to film the negotiations taking place between the leaders of the House and Senate who are hammering out a compromise between their two versions of the health care reform bill. He was turned down flat. The negotiations are being held in secret, and no one, least of all the public, is being allowed to see the ingredients being kneaded into this particular legislative sausage.

Not only is this a dismaying abuse of power on the part of the Democrats, it represents yet another of the President's broken promises. At least eight times while he was campaigning for the presidency he promised voters that all negotiations that involve bills affecting the American people will be conducted with transparency and even be televised on C-Span so that everyone can see what's going on. Here's the video:

(If this doesn't work go here)

Now, when it's time to man up and keep his commitment to the American public, the President has nothing to say. Little wonder that fewer and fewer people put any confidence in our president's words. Candidate Obama was apparently no more serious about transparency than he was about not hiring lobbyists, giving citizens time to study every bill before it was voted on, closing Gitmo, withdrawing from Iraq, and not raising taxes on the middle class.

Like many other politicians before him Mr. Obama seems willing to say anything he thinks people want to hear in order to get elected, and then, once in office, he turns out to be just another run-of-the-mill pol. It'll be a long time, I suspect, before another politician campaigns on the promise of hope and change, a phrase that Mr. Obama is sadly turning into a joke.

See Big Government for more on the President's failure to abide by his commitment to transparency.

RLC

Re: Another Blow to Global Warmists

A former student writes to administer a few dope slaps for my post titled Another Blow to Global Warmists. He makes several valid and helpful criticisms. His email is on our Feedback Page and my response follows it.

RLC

David Brooks on Tea Partiers

David Brooks, the erstwhile conservative ensconced at the New York Times, ponders, whilst holding his nose, the political influence of the current tea party-goers. In the course of his essay he notes the growing disdain of the common people for the dogmas tightly embraced by the educated elites:

Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should "go our own way" has risen sharply.

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy - with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

This is all true except for the incredibly obtuse assertion that the tea partiers are defined by what they are against. This is a libel. These simple folk oppose the things that Brooks lists because they are firmly committed to truth, transparency, life, and constitutionally protected freedoms. It's what they are for that defines them and motivates them to turn out by the thousands to protest the erosion of these rights and values at the hands of a supercilious political class that regards these people, much as Brooks does, as a bunch of rubes.

The tea party crowd do indeed oppose the concentration power in the educated elites, tacitly agreeing with William Buckley who once opined that he'd rather be governed by the first one hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. The educated class is no more moral nor competent than anyone else in this country - they only think themselves to be - and most "tea partiers" recognize that conceit for what it is.

RLC

Short Memories

I was watching MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews the other night, and a Democratic congresswoman made the claim that Cheney's criticisms of Obama's performance in office are unprecedented. No former Vice-President ever maligned the sitting president as has Dick Cheney maligned President Obama.

Well, I had to laugh at the shortness of the congresswoman's memory. Does she not remember former Vice-President Al Gore's famous rant against President George Bush in which he screamed into the microphone that:

"He betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place."

Does she not recall this 2006 speech by Gore in which he all but accused the Bush administration of criminality:

Does she not remember any of Al Gore's other attacks on Bush archived here?

What Cheney is doing, obviously, is defending the Bush administration from the incessant aspersions the President levels against it in almost every speech he gives. Had the Obama administration not felt the need to disparage the Bush White House at every opportunity Cheney would have no doubt been content to remain in quiet retirement on his Wyoming ranch.

Liberals apparently believe that Mr. Obama should be free to slap his predecessors around as petulantly and unfairly as he likes and Bush and Cheney should just sit there and take it.

Well, that's not going to happen. If the Democrats don't like Cheney's outspokenness then they should just do what most other administrations have done, certainly what the Bush administration did, and refrain from taking cheap shots at the people they've succeeded.

RLC

In Over His Head Or Just Tired?

Paul Rahe ponders whether the President is tired or just dispirited by the dawning realization that he's simply not up to the demands of the office to which he was elected:

In a recent puff piece, The New York Times reports that our President is tired. This is not the first such report. Back in May, when he treated England's Gordon Brown so shabbily, the excuse given - according to The Daily Telegraph - was that wrestling with the economic crisis had left Barack Obama too exhausted to be able to focus on foreign affairs.

Barack Obama may be genuinely tired, and he may be depressed as well. He certainly has warrant. In public, he may claim that he deserves a B+ for his first year in office, but the polling data suggests that he has earned a failing mark, and he has to know better.

[I]f Barack Obama harbored any doubts as to whether he was leading his party off a cliff, William Daley - the brains behind the Chicago machine - put these doubts to rest in the op-ed that he published on Christmas Eve in The Washington Post, warning that, if the Democrats did not plot "a more centrist course," they would "risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come."

Rahe writes a very compelling piece, and I commend it to you.

There is much evidence which I think supports the conclusion that Mr. Obama needed a lot more time in government before assuming the responsibilities of the presidency, but, having said that, I think some of the criticism from his opponents on the right, particularly in terms of his prosecution of the war on terrorism, is a bit unfair. I don't think all of it is, a lot of it is warranted, but I do think some of it is petty and childish.

To take a case in point, I tuned in several times the other day to the Sean Hannity radio show, and every time I listened, Hannity, in his characteristic unpleasantly shrill manner, was raking President Obama over the coals because the boxer shorts bomber almost succeeded, and because Obama didn't respond to this would-be attack for several days. This criticism struck me as unfair, trite, and mean-spirited all at once.

People like Hannity sometimes justify hammering away at the President on such minor points by noting that President Bush was subjected to much worse treatment from the Left. Yes, of course he was, but just because the Left often acted like imbeciles for the eight years of the Bush presidency that's not a reason why the Right should do the same now.

When conservatives train their guns on every little slip - no matter how real or imaginary - they lose credibility with those who are not committed to their views (and even many who are). People like Hannity make it inevitable that legitimate criticisms of the Obama presidency will be shrugged off as just more petty "right-wing Obama bashing." Conservatives look hypocritical, for example, when they fume about the Obama administration trying the Nigerian terrorist in a civilian, rather than a military, court after they had said nothing about the Bush administration doing the same thing with the "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid.

Conservatives also make themselves look silly and unserious when they pummel Mr. Obama without extending to him the same benefit of the doubt they would have extended to Mr. Bush. They should avoid exhibiting the same tawdry, mindless behavior we saw from the Left for most of the last decade, and, instead of partisan nit-picking, conservatives should save their fire for things that really matter. It's not as if this presidency hasn't provided enough legitimate targets out there at which to aim.

RLC

Mind and Brains

One of the major objections to the notion that we possess an immaterial mind that somehow works in concert with our material brain is that interaction between two radically different substances is incomprehensible. We can comprehend how one material thing can interact with another because we see it all the time, the materialist says, but how can an immaterial thing like mind cause an effect in a material thing like a brain? Since the dualist cannot explain how this is possible their belief in mind/brain interactionism is thereby believed to be discredited.

As physicist Stephen Barr points out in a book review in the January First Things (subscription only), however, few who pose this objection to dualism stop to ask how it is that anything interacts with anything else. The materialist (one who believes that matter is all there is) assumes that matter can interact with matter, but if you ask a materialist to actually explain the interaction you draw a blank.

The same explanatory problem confronting the dualist confronts the materialist whenever he tries to understand how two material objects interact or how a force like magnetism interacts with matter, or how matter interacts with space. We simply don't know how these phenomena take place.

Barr writes:

Material bodies are made up of electrically charged particles that interact with each other through the mediation of electromagnetic fields: The charged particles affect the fields and the fields affect the particles. By what "means" or "mechanism" this happens physics does not say. It simply says that when electromagnetic fields are present, the charges are, in fact, affected as described by a certain equation; and when the charges are present the fields are affected as described by another equation. In other words, physics posits two types of entities and mathematically describes, but does not otherwise explain, their influence on each other.

Gravity poses the same problem. We have no idea how gravity "pulls" objects toward a massive body, or, for that matter, how a massive body produces gravity in the first place, or even what gravity is. If we fall back on the Einsteinian explanation that gravity is simply the bending of space around a material object then we've simply pushed the problem back a step. How, it can be asked, do material bodies bend space? If space is essentially "nothing" how is it affected by a "something" in its midst?

The materialist has no answer, but that doesn't stop him from believing it nor from disparaging the dualist for thinking that mind and brains interact. Pretty ironic, don't you think?

RLC

Hey, Let's Do Away With Science Class

What do people who are convinced that a just society is one in which there are no disparities between citizens do when faced with such disparities? Consider the plans of a public high school in Berkeley. Distraught over the fact that the achievement of the school's black students is low compared to that of other racial groups and dismayed by the fact that advanced science classes are populated mostly by whites, the Berkeley wiseheads have decided that the best solution is to eliminate challenging science classes.

I know this sounds like something you'd see in a Monty Python skit, but apparently it's true. Thomas Lifson fills us in via a piece at American Thinker:

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

According to the muddled thinking on display at the Berkeley school the best way to help blacks is to limit opportunities for everyone. If one group is performing above average and another below average well, then, there must be institutional racism afoot. Let's make everyone the same by eliminating those courses dominated by whites and in which blacks struggle. If some excel while others languish the righteous approach is to bring everyone down to the level of the least able.

Liberal egalitarianism is rarely so blunt or obvious. Lifson continues:

Aside from the repulsive racism of this move, the broader issue to be considered is whether society is better-served by cutting down the achievers and investing in the stragglers -- or whether everyone benefits from the achievements of those who apply themselves enough to excel. I have no hesitation in saying that I am in the latter camp. How does it benefit anyone to have an America made up of mediocre minds?

I wonder what's next. Are the Berkeley docents going to propose eliminating those sports teams dominated by blacks? Are they going to eliminate math classes in which whites and Asians excel relative to blacks? Are they going to cancel AP courses in general which tend to be disproportionately white and Asian? Perhaps they might carry the logic of their proposal to its conclusion and eliminate school altogether since statistics show black academic achievement in our society lagging well behind that of other groups no matter what the curriculum might be.

The argument might run thus: School just sets blacks up for failure; the failure of one group while others succeed is damaging to the unsuccessful group's self-esteem; therefore let's just do away with academics altogether. This chain of reasoning, would no doubt make perfect sense in certain progressive precincts.

Perhaps you are appalled by the sheer lunacy of what the Berkelians propose but, in fact, it's the sort of thing to which liberal assumptions about race and class frequently lead us.

RLC

Standing Against the Utopians

You may not have ever heard of Jean Francois Revel, but you would do well to make his posthumous acquaintance. Revel was (he died four years ago) a French intellectual who was perhaps the greatest French defender of American democracy and capitalism since Tocqueville.

In a century in which it was fashionable for French intellectuals like Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida to embrace socialism and disdain the bourgois capitalism of the United States, and indeed to disdain the United States itself, Revel stood stout against the wooly-headed utopianisms of his leftist peers. His books included How Democracies Perish, The Totalitarian Temptation, Anti-Americanism, Without Marx or Jesus, and The Last Exit to Utopia.

This last work, written in 1999, has recently been translated into English and is reviewed in City Journal by Guy Sorman. Sorman writes:

[Revel] could never solve the ultimate puzzle of the Left's blindness, however: why would educated scholars elevate utopian fantasy above reality? The failures of the Soviet Union, its mass cruelties, had been known in the West since the 1930s: Andr� Gide had denounced them in his book, Return from the USSR. Scholars and journalists in the West did not need to wait for Solzhenitsyn to learn about the existence of the Gulag. Yet these truths had little consequence. Leftist intellectuals rationalized any bad news by explaining that the Soviet Union did not practice "real socialism." After the Berlin Wall came down, many on the left took the event not as a rejection of socialism but as an opportunity at last to build true socialism, free of Russian perversion.

Revel tried to explain this utopian yearning through Rousseau's influential doctrine: man was inherently good, society bad. Therefore, as Rousseau had it, reforming society-starting with the suppression of private property-would allow man's fundamentally good nature to shine forth. Another source of the utopian fantasy, he believed, came from the European Catholic canon: good intentions count most. Even after learning that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich killed approximately the same number of their own citizens, leftist intellectuals rejected any comparison between the two regimes; after all, the Soviets' intentions were better than the Nazis', and intentions trump results. Revel could barely contain his ire at leftist scholars who refused to discuss the matter honestly.

He believed, with excessive optimism, that reasoning could eventually persuade socialists that they were wrong. His philosophical superiority was rooted in this commitment to reason, but his political weakness was to underestimate the power of myths, ideologies, and religions in shaping (and hardening) people's views.

Revel's books are thus deeply relevant to the current American debate on the future role of government: should good intentions (like "health care for all") take precedence over the predictable bad results of such measures? Should political myths (the benevolent state) be fought with facts, or by promoting counter-myths (like the libertarian utopia)? America's loud and disgruntled demonstrators, from universal health-care activists to Tea Partiers, would benefit from an encounter with this great defender of the free society.

The utopian impulse is very much alive in the contemporary edition of the Democratic party, but we must not forget that such impulses have invariably led to the loss of freedom and not infrequently to oppression. It was Revel's great contribution to western civilization that he would not allow the Left to promote their collectivist, dehumanizing schemes unchallenged.

RLC

Good Advice, Mostly

Brit Hume offers some good advice to Tiger Woods on Fox News Sunday, but I have one reservation:

My concern is with Brit's assertion that Tiger can make a complete recovery by turning his life over to Christ. I'm not sure what he means by "complete recovery," but if he means that Tiger can eventually work his way back to the top of the golf world and recover his family as if nothing ever happened, I don't think that's how things work. Our choices, our conduct, have consequences that cannot be erased just because we have turned our life around. Even if Woods followed Hume's advice he'll still have to live with the hurt and devastation he's caused his family and admirers. He still has to live with the fact that it will be very hard for anyone close to him ever to trust him again. He still has to live with the fact that he's become a butt of jokes which will be around for a decade or more. He still has to live with the damage he's done to his reputation.

There is redemption in Christianity to be sure, but many who have all but wrecked their lives and subsequently found forgiveness in Christ have also found their lives reoriented in directions they never would have anticipated. Chuck Colson comes to mind. It may be that part of Tiger's redemption is that he never golfs competitively again, but that, like Colson, he finds himself moving on a path of service rather than a path of personal financial success.

In other words, Hume is right that Woods' best hope is in the life-changing power of the Gospel, but no one should think that just because one has been rescued from a burning building that their own burns will be miraculously healed. Instead, we often have to learn to live with their pain even as we are filled with gratitude that we were rescued before we were completely destroyed.

RLC

Let's All Grow Up

In the company of friends on New Year's Eve I asked if I was wrong to think that our national media was acting reprehensibly in reporting on Tiger Woods' personal life. What business is it of anyone's what he does, I asked? He's not paid by tax dollars, he's not accountable to the people, what right does the media have to humiliate him by reporting on the sordid details of his dalliances with women other than his wife? What right do they have to humiliate Woods' wife and children by exposing their husband and father as a sex-addicted philanderer?

Someone in the group replied that that's just what those people do, they see it as their mission in life to destroy people's reputations and lives by publicizing personal details about them to a public which is only too eager to revel in the scandal and to make them the butt of jokes and mockery. The media feeds our, and their, basest instincts, and we lap it up like a cat at the milk bowl. It makes some in the media, and many of their subscribers, feel better to know that other people are no better, and maybe a lot worse, than they are. It confers a feeling of moral superiority on the viewer and reader to see the famous and the popular brought low.

Woods' behavior, as awful as it was, is none of the media's business and none of our business. Eliot Spitzer's was. Mark Sanford's was. Max Baucus' was. John Edwards' was. Bill Clinton's was. These are people who were, in one way or another, misbehaving on the public's dime. Woods wasn't. The media have no more right to probe into his life than they had the right to malign Joe the Plumber or embarrass Sarah Palin's daughter.

There are so many stories that need to be reported, but the media, at least the left-leaning media, ignores them in favor of satisfying their fixation on trying to uncover dirt on whoever they think they may be able to destroy. Compared to the reporting on Tiger Woods how many stories have appeared on the nightly news explaining exactly what's in the health care bills? How many accounts have been written in newspapers about President Obama's "safe schools czar," the execrable Kevin Jennings? How much reporting has there been in the dominant media on the fraudulent manipulation of data, and the attempt to silence opposition, by global warming climatologists?

When did journalists abandon the idea that their profession, their calling, was to inform and edify the American public about things that really matter? When did news media professionals begin to think that their responsibility was not to educate but to titillate and gossip? It seems that many journalists no longer aspire to expose corruption in high places. Rather they give the impression that their dream story would be to report that Tiger Woods' latest mistress was Sarah Palin's daughter and that their tryst took place at Dick Cheney's ranch.

That, it too often seems, is too many journalists' idea of a blockbuster story.

RLC

Another Blow to the Global Warmists

One of the arguments that has been used to support the claim that humans are causing the earth's climate to change goes something like this:

The earth is warming as evidenced by retreating glaciers. Increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by humans, could account for that warming. We know that gases like carbon dioxide have been produced in greater quantities in the last two centuries by human activity. Therefore, human activity must be causing the earth to warm.

A study reported in Science News, however, kicks the props out from under this argument. The study shows that, despite increases in CO2 production since the industrial revolution, the accumulated CO2 in the earth's atmosphere has not changed in the last 160 years and thus cannot be the cause of whatever climate change there has been over that span:

To assess whether the airborne fraction [of CO2] is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data. In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The CO2 that is emitted into the atmosphere is reabsorbed by green plants, particularly algae in the oceans. If Knorr's findings are correct it seems that the earth has a far greater capacity to handle the carbon dioxide load than had previously been thought. Before we spend trillions of dollars to fix a problem that doesn't exist, i.e. overloading the atmosphere with CO2, perhaps we should look elsewhere for the cause of our retreating glaciers.

RLC

Robin Goes to Mass

We mentioned in a post the other day the experience of Robin of Berkeley who tried to find a church at which to worship on Christmas eve. Well, after her disappointing experience with liberal Episcopalians, Robin, who's a middle-aged psychotherapist and former atheistic, socialist, Jewish woman, finally found what she was looking for.

It's a good story and funny.

RLC

How Can This Be?

One liberal shibboleth often accepted without much analysis is that in order to reduce violent crime we have to limit the sales of firearms to citizens. This may seem to make sense in some superficial way, but whenever one looks at the data, as John Lott does in More Guns, Less Crime, it turns out that violent crime actually diminishes in environments in which citizens are armed.

This is completely counterintuitive to those who believe that the solution to every problem is to limit the freedoms of those who act responsibly, but in fact it makes perfect sense. Criminals do a subliminal risk/benefit analysis when they pick their prey. By raising the uncertainty level in the criminal's mind as to whether a potential victim may be armed, he may decide that the risk outweighs the potential benefit and think better of attacking his victim. If the criminal misjudges the risk and does attempt the crime his chances of success are diminished when the victim is armed - a fact which could deter other thugs who hear of the misfortunes suffered by their acquaintances who picked on the wrong target.

As evidence that this is not just speculative theorizing I adduce this interesting data from an article on an NRA website:

Last week, the FBI issued its preliminary 2009 crime report, showing that the number of murders in the first half of 2009 decreased 10 percent compared to the first half of 2008. If the trend holds for the remainder of 2009, it will be the single greatest one-year decrease in the number of murders since at least 1960, the earliest year for which national data are available through the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Also, the per capita murder rate for 2009 will be 51 percent lower than the all-time high recorded in 1991, and it will be the lowest rate since 1963-a 46-year low. Final figures for 2009 will be released by the FBI next year.

According to gun control supporter dogma-"more guns means more crime"-the number of privately owned firearms must have decreased 10 percent in 2009. To the contrary, however, the number rose between 1.5 and 2 percent, to an all-time high. For the better part of the last 15 months, firearms, ammunition, and "large" ammunition magazines have been sold in what appear to be record quantities. And, the firearms that were most commonly purchased in 2009 are those that gun control supporters most want to be banned-AR-15s, similar semi-automatic rifles, and handguns designed for defense.

Whether or not there really is an inverse correlation between gun purchases and violent crime, the fact is that the statistics simply do not support the belief that there's a direct correlation between them.

Parenthetically, a gun dealer of my acquaintance told me a few months after the 2008 election that sales of firearms were booming. People were afraid that the Obama administration would seek to make gun purchases either difficult or impossible, and they wanted to make sure they didn't wait until it was too late to buy their weapons. He went on to say that had he known what a boon Obama's election would have been to his business he would have voted for him himself.

RLC

A Better Way to Do Health Care Reform

Ronald Bailey at Reason offers an outline of what market-based health care might look like. Here's part of it:

The typical American might purchase high-deductible insurance policies that cover expensive treatments for chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, AIDS, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis, as well as the catastrophic consequences of accidents. Coverage would also include expensive treatments such as heart surgery, organ transplants, dialysis, and radiation therapy. In addition, we'd be able to buy health status insurance that would guarantee that we could purchase insurance at reasonable prices in the future.

Such policies are available already. The online clearinghouse eHealthInsurance pulls a quote of $131 per month from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield for a single 55-year-old male with a $3,000 annual deductible, no co-payment after the deductible, reasonable pharmaceutical benefits, and lifetime maximum benefits of $7 million, with an option for health savings accounts. (With such accounts, consumers make annual tax-deductible contributions, then take tax-free withdrawals to pay for uninsured medical costs.) That was the cheapest plan, but more than 80 other insurance policies were available. As deductibles went down, of course, the prices went up.

A lot of routine care could be handled through retail health clinics located in shopping malls, drug store chains, and megastores. Such centers would be staffed not with physicians but with nurse practitioners or other qualified personnel. Consumers generally would pay for routine, everyday transactions directly out of their health savings accounts.

As has been suggested by others, perhaps health insurance should be more like auto insurance. We expect our health insurance to cover everything from prescription drugs to doctor visits for the flu, but we don't expect such routine maintenance for our car to be covered by our auto insurance. We buy auto insurance in the case that we have a catastrophic accident, not to cover state inspections or to have a fuel pump replaced.

By placing the responsibility for purchasing insurance on the individual consumer rather than on employers the employee could be given the cost of their insurance otherwise withheld in their pay check, they would have portability since they wouldn't lose coverage if they switched jobs or lost their job, and employers would benefit by having more money available to them to hire more employees.

Ideas like this are at least worth looking into, but they're not going to be popular in Washington because they wouldn't allow the government camel to get its nose inside the tent of our health care.

RLC