The Significance of Good Friday

The following is a meditation I've posted on several Good Fridays over the years:

I sit at my computer on this Good Friday listening to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion and Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, looking forward to this evening when I have a "date" with my daughter to watch Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, and I wonder. I wonder if I, or anyone, can possibly understand the significance of Good Friday. Can I ever comprehend what it means that God, the creator of worlds, would care enough about me to endure what He did, so that I could have the hope that death does not have the final word about human life.

My existence, the existence of each of us, is astonishing enough. That mere matter could be so arranged as to generate a consciousness, a self-awareness, a rational mind, is, when one thinks about it, a truly amazing thing. That this consciousness might survive death in another reality, another world, is even more astounding. For some it's too astounding to be credible.

And yet if it's true...if it's in fact true that our eternal survival is a gift from God, purchased by Jesus Christ at a cost we may never be able to fully appreciate, it is a breath-taking, ineffable truth.

Some people think the Christian narrative is simply the apotheosis of an ancient myth, that a truly sophisticated, omniscient God would have found some way other than a primitive blood sacrifice to usher us into eternal joy. I don't know if there were other means at God's disposal or not, but it seems to me that the way the Bible tells us He chose is perfect for what He wanted to accomplish.

In the Christian account, God made us as an object of His love. He desires to live in a love relationship with us, but for whatever reason we often want no part of such a relationship. It's too confining, it involves too much self-abnegation, it entails too much of a constraint on our Dionysian appetites, it's too much of an affront to our pride, reason and dignity. Confident in our independence, we don't need God. In our autonomy we distort God's purposes and design plan for human life in order to suit and pursue our own selfish ends.

Nevertheless, God would not be dissuaded or put off. He persists in His relentless attempts to show us that all of our rationalizations for demanding our Promethean emancipation are just so many childish and foolish masks we put on to conceal the fact that we just don't want Him in our lives. He chooses to woo us to Himself not with threats or fear but with love. He chooses to demonstrate in an extraordinarily vivid way that His love for us is deeper than we could ever imagine.

To this end he does something totally unexpected and supererogatory. He becomes a man like one of us, shares in our humanity, our sufferings and joys, and ultimately endures the pain and horror of crucifixion. His life and death is the price that He is willing to pay, for reasons that we cannot understand this side of eternity, to secure eternal life and to make it available to everyone. He didn't have to do it, He could have left us alone to destroy ourselves and our planet, to fade into the cosmic oblivion that rejection of our Creator would have warranted. But because He did do it, He shows us not only that He is not simply some abstract deity, too transcendent to matter, but that He is personal and immanent, and that His love is not just a theoretical exercise, but has consequences which can change a life now and forever.

Charles Dickens captures something of the Divine love in the climax of his Tale of Two Cities when he has Sydney Carton, moved by his deep love for Lucie, smuggle himself into prison to take the place of Charles Darnay, the man Lucie really loves, knowing full well that his love is ultimately going to bring him to the guillotine. Carton substitutes himself for Charles and goes to the death to which Charles was sentenced in an expression of almost superhuman love.

Out of the depths of His love, God substituted Himself for us, submitting to torture and humiliation at the hands of His own creation, and enduring a horrific death so that we could live. He asks of us in return only our love.

We are in the position of a man clinging by his fingers to the edge of a cliff and slowly, inexorably losing his grip. The abyss of nihilism, of meaninglessness, emptiness and death, lies far below, but because of the cross there's a chance to be rescued. God stands above the struggling man, kneels and holds out His hand, urging the man to seize it. It's up to the man about to die, it's up to us, to accept the rescue that God offers. God has done all He can to persuade us, but He won't force us to grasp His hand. He won't override our will. He allows us to make the final decision whether to live or die.

That, at any rate, is the best I can do to explain my own wholly inadequate understanding of the Christian story and the meaning of Good Friday.

Flat Tax

Yesterday was tax deadline day and Bill Whittle, the "virtual president," observed the occasion by making a succinct case for a flat tax. God bless him:

One of the key points in this video, in my opinion, was the statistic on how much of the tax burden is born by the top 1%, top 5%, and everyone else. When half the country pays no income tax they really have no investment in the country. That's not a good situation - for them or for the country.

The Other Shoe Is About to Drop

Betsy McCaughey is an expert on health care issues who has been highly critical of Obamacare. In a column in the New York Post she warns that the worst is yet to come. Insurance companies will be rolling out their new policies in June and McCaughey predicts that it will not be pretty. She highlights four big problems that will emerge over the coming year: Premium defaults, premium increases, loss of on-the-job coverage, and loss of cancer care coverage. Here's a summary of each of her points:

Premium Defaults: Twenty percent of the alleged 7.5 million people who have signed up in the exchanges have not paid their first premium and aren't covered, but that's not the worst of it:

The bigger question is how many will keep paying premiums. That’s got the American Medical Association, a chief ObamaCare booster, so worried that it’s sending warnings to its members.

Why the concern? First-time insurance purchasers, especially those living paycheck to paycheck, will be shocked by ObamaCare’s high deductibles, about $3,000 for the silver plan (the most commonly selected) and $5,000 for the bronze plan (the most affordable).

Basically, you’ll have to pay thousands out of pocket for appointments, tests and prescriptions until you reach your deductible.

Rather than pay thousands out of pocket for care while also paying premiums, some will quit paying premiums.

That’s why the AMA is worried. Section 1412 of the health law gives consumers a 90-day “grace period” before their subsidized plan is canceled for nonpayment. But insurers only have to keep paying doctors and hospitals for 30 days. The next 60 days of care are on the care provider. The AMA says “it could pose a significant financial risk for medical practices.”

Not only will the deductibles be a shock to consumers, so will the premium hikes which come out in June:

Overall, consumers had to pay far more for individual plans this year. In some states (Delaware and New Hampshire), rates went up 90 percent or even 100 percent, according to a newly released Morgan Stanley analysis.

And insurance executives already are warning about double- or triple-digit hikes for next year. “I do think it’s likely premium-rate shocks are coming,” said Chet Burrell, CEO of Care First BlueCross BlueShield. Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, one of the first to raise the alarm, said increases “could go as high as 100 percent.”

Meanwhile, 25 million to 30 million Americans could lose coverage in the coming months:

For the same reasons that millions of policies in the individual market were canceled last year, employers who buy plans in the small-group market will have a hard time renewing their old plans this year. Many will have to choose between providing the more costly ObamaCare benefit package or dropping coverage altogether.

Count on employers with low-wage work forces (such as retailers, hoteliers and restaurateurs) to push employees and their families into the exchanges.

And if you have cancer your access to good treatment will be restricted:

Cancer is the leading cause of death in America and our No. 1 health fear. But access to the nation’s top cancer centers is becoming a hot-button issue, as ObamaCare enrollees are finding how few choices of hospitals and doctors they have.

Many plans exclude all specialty cancer hospitals, even though research shows that women with ovarian cancer, for example, live a year longer when they are treated at high-volume cancer hospitals instead of local facilities. But insurers say they’d have to raise premiums for exchange plans even higher if this growing outrage over access to cancer centers forces them to broaden their networks.

If McCaughey's analysis turns out to be correct, it's hard to see how Mr. Obama's signature achievement, Obamacare, will not go down in history as a national calamity.

Academic Justice

A recent column by New York Times columnist Russ Douthat calls our attention to an article written last February by a Harvard senior for the university paper The Crimson. The student's name is Sandra Korn and she illustrates perfectly the left-wing progressive mindset.

Ms Korn thinks academic freedom is a bad thing and should be replaced in academia by what she calls "academic justice," which, given her description of it, is the exact opposite of both "academic" and "justice." In Ms Korn's view "justice" pretty much means "agreeing with her." Here's her introduction:

In July 1971, Harvard psychology professor Richard J. Herrnstein penned an article for Atlantic Monthly titled “I.Q.” in which he endorsed the theories of UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, who had claimed that intelligence is almost entirely hereditary and varies by race. Herrnstein further argued that because intelligence was hereditary, social programs intended to establish a more egalitarian society were futile—he wrote that “social standing [is] based to some extent on inherited differences among people.”

When he returned to campus for fall semester 1971, Herrnstein was met by angry student activists. Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society protested his introductory psychology class with a bullhorn and leaflets. They tied up Herrnstein’s lectures with pointed questions about scientific racism. SDS even called for Harvard to fire Herrnstein, along with another of his colleagues, sociologist Christopher Jencks.

Did SDS activists at Harvard infringe on Herrnstein’s academic freedom? The answer might be that yes, they did—but that’s not the most important question to ask. Student and faculty obsession with the doctrine of “academic freedom” often seems to bump against something I think much more important: academic justice.

We might pause at this point to ask this question: What if an unpopular view like Herrnstein's happens to be true? Truth seems not to matter to academic brownshirts like Ms Korn. Nor does it seem to occur to her that she might not be in possession of the truth herself and might have something to learn from someone who has actually been around a few decades longer than she has. This is all obfuscation, however, to progressives like Ms Korn. Herrnstein and those like him shouldn't be allowed to promote their views in the university because left-wing progressives find those views deplorable. She states:

If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

Has it occurred to Ms Korn that preventing people from pursuing the truth is also a form of oppression? Isn't it oppressive to deprive people of the freedom to voice their opinions? Is not Ms Korn herself "justifying oppression" of a different sort? All of which raises a further question. What if, per impossible, the university were to consider the views of Ms Korn to be insidiously harmful to the values Americans cherish? Would the university be warranted in shutting her up? Would silencing her be an act of academic justice?

The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do....Only those who care about justice can take the moral upper hand.

It is tempting to decry frustrating restrictions on academic research as violations of academic freedom. Yet I would encourage student and worker organizers to instead use a framework of justice. After all, if we give up our obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom, we can consider more thoughtfully what is just.

Well, since Ms Korn is concerned about the "moral upper hand" let's ask this question: At a secular institution like Harvard, run, no doubt, by secular progressives like Ms Korn, what exactly is the "moral upper hand"? Indeed, what is her conception of justice? Secularists like to throw around words like "morality" and "justice" while simultaneously dismissing the idea that these terms actually mean anything.

When we peel away progressive rhetoric what we find is that "moral" is whatever the left thinks is just, and "justice" is whatever leftist cause happens to be in fashion on any given day. Beyond this the words mean nothing. They have no objective significance because they have no objective ground.

Only a justice rooted in a transcendent, perfectly good, moral authority - the God of Christian theism, for example - can carry any obligation to observe its strictures. If God is disregarded, as the left generally insists he be, then justice is reduced to nothing more than a term that packs a rhetorical wallop, but actually refers to nothing more than one's subjective preferences.

A well-known twentieth century progressive, the Russian dictator and mass murderer Vladimir Lenin, put it this way: "We repudiate all morality (i.e. concepts of justice) that proceeds from supernatural ideas....[Justice] is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is [just] that is necessary to the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat."

To which Ms Korn presumably lends her enthusiastic assent.

All Cultures Are Not Equal

I was away most of the last couple of days so I thought I'd run a piece from the archives that dovetails with a couple of recent posts. This one's from December 27, 2010:

Paul Marshall is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. He studies the persecution of Christians and has a very sobering piece at National Review Online on the atrocities many Christian believers are forced to suffer around the globe. One wonders why there's not an international outcry against the sort of brutal oppression he recounts. It certainly doesn't seem to have triggered the same sort of response that, say, the deaths of a half dozen terrorists at the hands of Israelis attempting to enforce an embargo would trigger.

I copy Marshall's full essay here because it just seems too important to interrupt by having the reader go to the link. I hope he and NRO don't mind. Please read it all:

Herod has his current imitators. In 1991, China’s state-run press noted the role of the churches in undercutting Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, adding that if China did “not want such a scene to be repeated in its land, it must strangle the baby while it is still in the manger.” Al-Qaeda has declared that all Middle Eastern Christians should be killed, and many Christians in Iraq have canceled their Christmas celebrations lest they be targeted.

Others, while less explicit, have similar ends. Iran has passed a death sentence on Yousef Nadarkhani, pastor of the Full Gospel Church of Iran congregation in the northern city of Rasht. Nadarkhani became a Christian 16 years ago and was arrested on October 12, 2009, after protesting a government decision that his son must study the Koran. On Sept. 21 and 22, 2010, the Eleventh Chamber of the Assizes Court of Gilan Province said that he was guilty of apostasy and sentenced him to death for leaving Islam. (Apostasy is not a crime under any Iranian statute — the judges simply referred to the opinions of Iranian legal scholars).

Another Iranian Christian pastor, Behrouz Sadegh-Khanjani, may face a similar fate. He was arrested on June 6, 2010, and is still being held even though his detention order expired in October.

In Afghanistan, after a TV program showed video of indigenous Christians worshiping last May, many Christians were forced to flee, and as many as 25 were arrested. One of those arrested was Said Musa, a father of six young children, who had converted to Christianity eight years previous. He had stepped on a landmine while serving in the Afghan Army and now has a prosthetic leg. Musa had worked for the Red Cross/Red Crescent for 15 years, fitting patients for prosthetic limbs — it was after going to their office in Kabul on May 31 to request leave that he was arrested.

The prosecutor, Din Mohammad Quraishi, said Musa was accused of conversion to another religion. In early June, the deputy secretary of the Afghan parliament, Abdul Sattar Khawasi, said that “those Afghans that appeared on this video film should be executed in public.” The authorities forced Musa to renounce Christianity on television, but he has continued to say he is a Christian. In the first months of his detention, he suffered sexual abuse, beatings, mockery, and sleep deprivation because of his faith. He appeared, shackled, before a judge on November 27. No Afghan lawyer will defend him and, in early December, authorities denied him access to a foreign lawyer.

Another Afghan Christian, Shoib Assadullah, was arrested on October 21, 2010, for giving a copy of the New Testament to a man, and is being held in Mazar-e-Sharif. As with Musa, no Afghan lawyer has agreed to defend him, and both will probably face charges of apostasy, a crime that is punishable by death under the government’s version of sharia. As the State Department’s 2010 International Religious Freedom Report notes, religious freedom in Afghanistan has diminished “particularly for Christian groups and individuals.”

One of the most ignored stories of 2010 has been the campaign by the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabab militia in Somalia to kill all Somali Christians on the grounds that they are apostates. They have even beheaded Christians’ children. In one of the latest incidents, 17-year-old girl Nurta Mohamed Farah fled her village of Bardher in the Gedo Region after her parents shackled her to a tree and tortured her for leaving Islam. She went to the Galgadud Region to live with relatives, but shortly after, she was shot in the head and the chest and died.

Not content with killing people, on December 16, al-Shabab destroyed a Christian library they found in a derelict farm in the Luuq district — Christians often bury their Bibles and other books to escape detection. International Christian Concern reports that al-Shabab brought Bibles, Christian books, and audio/video materials to the city center and burned them after noon prayers.

At Christmas, we should remember these churches, each of which continues to grow, and remember these prisoners and others like them. Assadullah emphasizes that he “wants others to know that he is not frightened, and that his faith is strong.” Musa writes that “because the Holy Spirit always with me my situation is not bad until now. I see after what the plan of God is with me.”

It's a symptom of intellectual insecurity, I suppose, that people are so threatened by another belief system, one that does them no harm and has certainly done them much good, that they'll seek to kill those who adhere to it. It's a symptom not only of stupidity but also of savagery and barbarism.

Perhaps the best reason for pulling our troops and aid out of Afghanistan, indeed the toughest question that I've seen posed by advocates of getting out now, is Why should American soldiers be fighting and dying for people like these? That's a hard one to answer.

Hirsi Ali and Liberal Core Values

By now you've probably heard about the contretemps surrounding Brandeis University's decision, under President Frederick Lawrence, to rescind its offer of an honorary doctorate degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. For those who may not know, Ali was a Somali girl who suffered a clitorectomy when she was young and was later married off against her will to a cousin living in Canada. En route to Canada via Germany, she took a train to the Netherlands and stayed. Eventually she ran for parliament and won.

She and another member of parliament, Theo van Gogh, great grandson of the famous artist, spoke out strongly against Islamic hatred and violence. Van Gogh was murdered in the street by a Muslim man who stuck a note in van Gogh's chest with a knife threatening Ali with the same fate. Here's Mark Steyn writing about her a number of years ago:

She lives under armed guard and was forced to abandon the Netherlands because quite a lot of people want to kill her. And not in the desultory behead-the-enemies-of-Islam you-will-die-infidel pro forma death-threats-R-us way that many of us have perforce gotten used to in recent years: her great friend and professional collaborator was murdered in the streets of Amsterdam by a man who shot him eight times, attempted to decapitate him, and then drove into his chest two knives, pinning to what was left of him a five-page note pledging to do the same to her.

What would you do in those circumstances? Would you be [going out in public] with a price on your head? Or would you duck out of sight, lie low, change your name, move to New Zealand, and hope one day to get your life back? After the threats against the Comedy Central show South Park the other week, Ms. Hirsi Ali turned up on CNN to say that the best defence against Islamic intimidation is for us all to stand together and thereby "share the risk." But, around the world, every single translator of her books has insisted on total anonymity. When push comes to shove, very few are willing to share the risk.

Ali resigned from parliament when it was discovered that she had made false statements when she originally entered the country. Under constant threat of death for her outspoken criticisms of Islam and her apostasy (she became an atheist) she fled to the U.S. where she's accompanied by bodyguards twenty four hours a day. Still, despite the threats, she speaks out. She's a woman of incredible courage, a courage that dwarfs the pusillanimous administration of Brandeis University which sniffs that she doesn't reflect their "core values" because she once called Islam a “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death.”

Here's an example of the sort of thing Ali has been inveighing against. It's an illustration of what's happening to Christians throughout the Muslim world. This young Saudi girl, according to the source, had her eye and lips sewn shut because she had the impertinence to declare out loud in the presence of her Muslim employer, that Jesus was her savior.

Because Ali has had the courage to publicly condemn atrocities like this, and the beliefs which motivate them, Brandeis has decided that she is at odds with their "core values." One wonders what sort of values these might be with which Ali is in conflict.

You can find more commentary on Brandeis' decision to withdraw its offer to award Ali an honorary degree here.

The 77% Factoid

On Tuesday of this week President Obama delivered himself of a claim that he's made several times in the past. He asserted that,

Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns…in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.

He obviously intended to give the impression that there's a fundamental injustice in how men and women are compensated in the American workplace, but surely he knows better.

The Washington Post's fact checker Glenn Kessler explains. Here are a few excerpts:

June O’Neill, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who has been a critic of the 77-cent statistic, has noted that the wage gap is affected by a number of factors, including that the average woman has less work experience than the average man and that more of the weeks worked by women are part-time rather than full-time. Women also tend to leave the work force for periods in order to raise children, seek jobs that may have more flexible hours but lower pay and choose careers that tend to have lower pay.

When such differences are accounted for, much of the hourly wage gap dwindled, to about 5 cents on the dollar.

Indeed, BLS data show that women who do not get married have virtually no wage gap; they earn 96 cents for every dollar a man makes.

One study, for example, found that nine of the ten most remunerative college majors were dominated by men while nine of the ten least remunerative majors were dominated by women.

Not only does wittingly citing bogus statistics do nothing to engender confidence in the President's integrity it also made him look derisible when it was discovered that the wage disparity between men and women working in the White House is greater than it is in Washington as a whole:

McClatchy newspapers did the math and reported that when the same standards that generated the 77-cent figure were applied to White House salaries, women overall at the White House make 91 cents for every dollar men make. White House spokesman Jay Carney protested that the review “looked at the aggregate of everyone on staff, and that includes from the most junior levels to the most senior.” But that’s exactly what the Census Department does.

Kessler concludes that,

Unless women stop getting married and having children, and start abandoning careers in childhood education for naval architecture, this huge gap in wages will almost certainly persist. Democrats thus can keep bringing it up every two years.

There's a gap, but it's hardly the embarrassment the President claims it is. Indeed, the embarrassment is that despite having been repeatedly corrected on this factoid he persists in trotting it out. One might be forgiven for thinking that the dissimulation is a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people in order to give the Democrats an issue upon which they can hang their hat in November.

It's just a shame that Mr. Obama can't find an issue about which he can tell the truth and have it work to his political advantage. Apparently there aren't many of those out there.

Mozilla Offers a Glimpse of the Future

Jonathan Tobin at Commentary has written a fine piece highlighting the hypocrisy of the left concerning the Brandon Eich firing at Mozilla. Here are some highlights:

Though some are a bit shame-faced to do so, some liberals have decided that punishing individuals for their personal politics is OK because those who hold opinions contrary to their own are not only wrong but so hateful that their mere presence undermines the efforts of those associated with them.

That this is rank hypocrisy is so obvious that it barely needs to be said. If, say, a liberal business executive were to be ousted from a similar position at a Fortune 500 company because a lot of the shareholders or executives at the business didn’t like the fact that he or she was a supporter of gay marriage or had donated to prominent liberal candidates for office, you can bet your stock portfolio and your mortgage payment that the mainstream media and every left-wing pundit in creation would be anointing such a person for sainthood rather than twisting themselves into pretzels in order to justify Eich’s defenestration, as so many have already done.

That Mozilla’s employees and board members actually think it is consistent with American values or even “freedom of speech” (in the words of the company’s disingenuous announcement of Eich’s departure) to hound out of their midst someone who, though a supporter of gay rights in other respects, may disagree with them about marriage or support conservative candidates says something awful about such a group.

But if that’s how they feel, then it’s their right to do so even as many on the outside of their cozy left-wing bubble enclave jeer at a version of “inclusiveness” that demands ideological conformity.

Elsewhere in his piece Tobin notes that the argument has been advanced that Mozilla is a "special case," that it has a special culture, and that the employees at Mozilla are not acting thuggishly by burning at the stake, so to speak, a man whose political and religious views are not consonant with their own.

But then what of Hobby Lobby which is being coerced by the government to pay for insurance coverage for abortifacients against the convictions of those who own the company? Why are liberals not willing to grant Hobby Lobby the same exemptions they're willing to grant to Mozilla?

By claiming, as they now do, that the special culture of Mozilla requires it to root out all unbelievers in gay marriage or supporters of conservatives, but deny that Hobby Lobby has the right to protect its particular culture or the beliefs of its owners, liberals are ... engaging in hypocrisy. It would be nice if liberals were sufficiently self-aware of their inconsistency to cause them to “recant” and grant Hobby Lobby—which has an individual business culture just as special as the one at Mozilla—the same respect it demands for the Torquemadas who rule the roost in the high-tech sector. But I’m not expecting that to happen. The real problem here isn’t hypocrisy but a liberal mindset that views conservatives as not merely wrong, but evil.

A friend sent me a couple of quotes that he thought, and I agree, to be apropos this current controversy. The first is from Rene Girard who says that it is in Christianity that the drive for human sacrifice — endemic in all the paganisms, and reborn in modern ideologies — is extinguished. For it is in Christianity that God sacrifices Himself for men, instead of men sacrificing each other for their gods.

There certainly is a yearning for human sacrifice to the gods of political correctness in the modern secular left. Just ask Phil Robertson, Dan Cathy, or Brandon Eich.

The second quote is from the novelist Flannery O'Connor: “In the absence of faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chambers.”

Indeed, one gets the uncomfortable feeling, reading some of the commentary surrounding the Eich case, that it's not the left's moral scruples which constrain them from putting dissenters into reeducation camps and gas chambers but merely their lack, at least for the moment, of sufficient political power to do what they wish they could do.

I think both Girard and O'Connor are right. Society is like an island built out of the raw materials of a Christian worldview in the midst of a sea of barbarism, cruelty, and intolerance. When the dikes are torn down, and the sea rushes in then civilized behavior, including compassion and respect for others, will be swept away. George Orwell famously described what that future will be like in his novel 1984:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

Liberal Fascism

In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 words were used to mean precisely the opposite of what they do mean. "Peace is war, love is hate, freedom is slavery" the totalitarian masters of Oceania repeated over and over. Orwell, a man of the left, came to view the left as a great threat to freedom and illustrated that threat in his novel Animal Farm.

Sixty four years after Orwell's death the left is still the greatest threat to freedom, at least in this country, and still uses words to mean the opposite of what they do mean.

"Intolerance is Tolerant, Uniformity is Diversity, Bullying is Compassionate" is the modern expression of Orwell's famous triad.

At Mozilla the CEO, Brandon Eich, has been forced out because six years ago he made a relatively small donation to a group which was campaigning to keep the definition of marriage what it had been for 2000 years, what Barack Obama said at the time it should be, and what most Americans agreed it should be. Nevertheless, the left saw an opportunity to bully and intimidate by punishing a man for his views and they mounted a campaign to have him fired. This time they succeeded.

They had tried the same ugly tactic on previous occasions with Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-a, and Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty, only to be resoundingly rebuked by the public. In Eich's case it's harder for those who support him to demonstrate their support in any significant way.

The message is clear: Anyone who takes a stand for traditional marriage can expect the same thuggish treatment from the left.

But it's not just around the issue of gay marriage where such tactics are employed by the left.

At many universities and other institutions any scientist who deviates from the party line on naturalistic evolution will be denied tenure or other professional advantages. If the hapless victims are biology grad students they'll often find their life made difficult, and they may even be forced out of their program. More than one grad student or untenured professor has been advised to keep his unDarwinian opinions to him or herself until the PhD or tenure has been granted.

Many Christian students in public schools have been insulted and denied basic free speech rights, not by other students but by school personnel simply for praying over meals or writing an essay that incorporates Christian themes.

If one is participating in a silent pro-life vigil one can expect verbal and even physical abuse.

To oppose the president's policies, no matter how respectfully, is to incur the epithets of racist, bigot, and hater.

Many conservative speakers are either prevented from appearing on university campuses or their presentations are disrupted by left-wing students.

The left cannot win any of their arguments in a fair contest in the public square so they feel compelled to resort to bullying, name-calling, and intimidation. They fear, rightly, that they cannot afford to have people hear an alternative point of view so they have to prevent that competing point of view from being aired.

This is completely contrary to the spirit of our founding as a nation and is, in fact, the very essence of fascism. Many people have the misconception that fascism is a right-wing ideology, but this is false. Fascism, like communism, is a totalitarian system that imposes its will by force and compulsion and as such it's a phenomenon of the left.

When a man like Eich has his career ruined because he holds a view of which gay fascists disapprove, when scientists have their careers ruined because the academic fascists disapprove of their opinions, when people are suspended from school or fail a writing assignment because they express a worldview which the faculty brown-shirts disdain, then we no longer live in the land of the free and are in serious danger of collapsing into a sordid atheistic totalitarianism.

We must guard our freedoms, especially the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion, jealously or surely one day we'll realize we no longer have it. We should also reproach the tactics of those on the left, like the people who forced Brenden Eich out at Mozilla, who wish to strip us of our basic freedoms while imposing their own values of politically correct groupthink and social and moral conformity on the rest of us.

Barbarisms

Yesterday I reran a post on moral relativism that describes the horrific treatment of an Afghan girl named Bibi Aisha. The post first ran in 2011. The post below is a follow-up to the post on Bibi that I wrote a few days after:

Stanford journalism professor Joel Brinkley takes us on a quick tour of the underside of what passes for civilization in much of the world and concludes that relativism, both cultural and moral, seems simply foolish when confronted with the barbaric cruelties imposed on women and children in some foreign climes.

The relativist wants to say that what's wrong for us is not necessarily wrong for others. We're not perfect, the relativist avers, nor are we in the position of God that we can pass judgment on other societies, but as I argued last week in the case of Bibi Aisha, to refuse to condemn cruelty and injustice is to dehumanize both ourselves and those who suffer. Injustice is wrong wherever it occurs. Cruelty is evil wherever it occurs. Anyone who can read the following excerpt from Brinkley's column and not agree with those claims is morally underdeveloped:

On her final full day in office, President Roza Otunbayeva of Kyrgyzstan became the first senior Kyrgyz official to forcefully denounce “bride kidnapping,” an entrenched custom in her Central Asian state.

“Bride kidnapping is a tradition of the Kyrgyz people,” she acknowledged as she was preparing to leave the presidential palace on Nov. 29. “But these crimes often force women to commit suicide.”

Young men kidnap about 15,000 girls each year, Otunbayeva said. They simply grab a girl walking down the street, stuff her in the car, kicking and screaming, and take her home. He may rape her – or not. Either way, after she’s locked up overnight in an unrelated man’s house, the girl is unfit to wed anyone else. Her family won’t permit her to come home. So she’s forced to marry her kidnapper.

No one keeps precise statistics, but estimates suggest that half of Kyrgyz wives are married in this way. The outgoing president urged her people to stop romanticizing bride kidnapping and inaugurated a month-long campaign to fight the practice.

Around the world, numerous nations cling to longstanding traditions that, to Western eyes, seem barbarous – or worse. Most of them victimize girls.

In Northwestern Thailand, I interviewed a woman, one of many, preparing to sell her 12-year-old daughter to traffickers who would force her into prostitution. The mother intended to use the trafficker’s payment for her daughter to buy a new refrigerator. “It’s our tradition,” she explained.

In Saudi Arabia, centuries-old religious convention allows middle-aged men to marry prepubescent girls – some as young as 7 or 8 years old.

Pakistani officials use gang rape as a government-sanctioned punishment.

In Cameroon “breast ironing” remains an honored custom. After their daughters reach puberty, mothers heat a flat rock in the fire and then press it forcefully onto each of her daughter’s breasts – burning away breast tissue, leaving them flat-chested so avaricious young men will leave them alone.

“Breast ironing has existed as long as Cameroon has existed,” gynecologist Sinou Tchana told the Inter Press news service. Women “told us that it was normal for them.”

If it’s “normal for them,” how should Western societies regard practices like these? Anthropology’s “cultural relativism” rule suggests that we should not judge other countries by the standards of our own society. But some acts are just too vile, and cultural courtesies don’t stop human-rights groups from wagging their fingers at these states.

Brinkley is right. We avoid passing a judgment on these behaviors because we've bought into the paralyzing fallacy that moral right and wrong are matters of personal taste, and just as we should not criticize those who choose to eat roast dog meat so, too, should we refrain from criticizing those who press hot rocks to little girls' chests, or perform clitorectomies on young women, or practice "honor" killings, or shake crying babies until they suffer brain damage, or hold babies in scalding hot water, or sell children into slavery.

When we can no longer say that these things are wrong no matter where they're practiced we're no longer a sophisticated, civilized people. We're barbarians.

Moral Paralysis

In 2011 (12/5) I ran the following post under the title of The Fatuousness of Relativism. Having just talked about that topic recently in my classes I thought it'd be appropriate to run it again: Denyse O'Leary passes on a story told by a Canadian high school philosophy teacher named Stephen Anderson. Anderson recounts what happened when he tried to show students what can happen to women in a culture with no tradition of treating women as human beings:

I was teaching my senior Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies—multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha (see below). Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital. I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions, but I was not prepared for their reaction.

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff.” Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

While we may hope some are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is “never judge, never criticize, never take a position.”

This is a picture of Bibi Aisha. She was deliberately mutilated by her family because she did not want to stay in a marriage to which she did not consent and in which she was treated like livestock. Anyone who would do this to another human being is evil. Any culture which condones it is degenerate, and any person who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this, or to sympathize with her suffering, is a moral dwarf.

The shocking prevalence of moral dwarfism in our culture should not surprise us, however. Once a society jettisons its Judeo-Christian heritage it no longer has any non-subjective basis for making moral judgments. Its moral sense is stunted, warped, and diminished because it's based on nothing more than one's own subjective feelings. Since no one can say that their feelings are superior to the feelings of the people who did this to Bibi Aisha we hear fatuous insipidities like, "If it's right for them then it's right," or "It's wrong to judge other cultures."

This is moral paralysis, and it's the legacy of modernity and the secular Enlightenment.

Communicating a Love of Learning

Elizabeth Corey has a wonderful essay in First Things that every teacher and aspiring teacher should read. She describes the crucial importance of an inspiring mentor who's passionate about her discipline. Her essay is ostensibly about how to spark a love for the humanities in the hearts of students, but what she says applies to other disciplines as well. Here's an excerpt:

[I]n theory at least, any field, any book, any course of study, presented in the right way, can provide an entry point for the awakening of a desire for liberal learning.

For me it was a course in northern baroque art that focused on a study of Rubens. Most of us probably think of Rubens as a painter of women whose body shapes are now decidedly out of fashion. Like the rest of the class, I grudgingly began to look at the paintings, certain that I would always be repelled by their lack of accord with what I already knew, quite definitively, to be beautiful.

But as the days went by I underwent a remarkable transformation. The teacher explained the paintings in the context of both Flemish history and Rubens’s personal story. He showed us that the women in the paintings were not just bodies but Rubens’s wives, whom he had loved deeply; the children were his children, with names and histories of their own. He showed us the development over time of Rubens’s style, the debt he owed to the classical tradition, and the ways in which other painters subsequently built on his contribution.

As time went on, I grew to love the art—but more than this, the field of art history itself, and the professor too. It was not for his personality (austere and somewhat distant) or his looks (short and balding). It was for the vision and desire he had given me, perhaps partially without knowing it.

There have been others like this too, as there are for many of us once we’ve awakened to the joys of this kind of study. And there is no one model for it. Sometimes we develop a relationship with a particular person as a mentor, with whom we meet and talk regularly. These relationships may last for years, or a lifetime. In other cases, like any ordinary friendship, they die away after a period of time.

It is not even always the case that the person must take an intense interest in us, or we in them. At times we may simply perceive in a particular classroom a sense of “sacredness” that says to us: Here is what we should be doing.

Note that for Corey, and many others, too, I'd bet, the teacher who made such a difference in her life, who bequeathed to her a love for art and for whom she came to have such affection, wasn't particularly striking in the physical sense. What made the difference was his passion for his subject and his desire to communicate that passion to his students.

If you're hoping to be a teacher some day, or if you are one now, I think you'll find Corey's essay a very worthwhile read.

April Fools

The President was ebullient in the White House Rose Garden yesterday, April 1st, as he announced that 7.1 million people have signed up for Obamacare.

That number may or may not be meaningful. The purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to insure some 30 million people who previously lacked insurance. The country has been turned inside out in order to achieve this. Trillions of dollars will be spent over the next decade to accomplish it. So how many people who had been uninsured are among the 7.1 million? The administration won't say, but a Rand Corporation study which the administration has been sitting on but which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, found that the number of uninsured who have now signed up for insurance and paid their premium is considerably less than a million.

The UK Daily Mail has the story here.

Numbers from a RAND Corporation study that has been kept under wraps suggest that barely 858,000 previously uninsured Americans – nowhere near 7.1 million – have paid for new policies and joined the ranks of the insured by Monday night.

Others were already insured, including millions who lost coverage when their existing policies were suddenly cancelled because they didn't meet Obamacare's strict minimum requirements.

Still, [the President] claimed that 'millions of people who have health insurance would not have it' without his insurance law.'

[Press Secretary Jay Carney] dodged tough questions about other statistics that reporters thought he should have had at the ready. Those numbers included how many Americans have paid for their insurance policies, and are actually insured. Also, he had no answer to the thorny question of how few signups represented people who had no insurance before the Affordable Care Act took effect.

The Affordable Care Act carried with it the promise of covering 'every American,' and it appears to have fallen tremendously short.

There's more at the link.

When the President tells us that the administration met its goal for sign-ups in the first enrollment period we might keep in mind that he also assured us, repeatedly, that if we liked our doctors and our healthcare plan we could keep them. He also told us that our policies would be on average $2500 cheaper under the AFA. So, maybe it'd be prudent to take whatever he tells us with a truckload of salt.

The Explanatory Gap

The question often arises in discussions of the philosophy of mind how a materialist philosopher might respond to the problems posed to materialism by the phenomena of conscious experience. One way materialists respond is to simply admit that on our present knowledge materialism can't account for the gap between the physical elements of the brain and, say, the sensation of sound or color, but that some day we'll be able to explain these things in purely material terms.

Philosopher Russell Blackford at New Philosopher gives us an example of this response. When he speaks below of the "explanatory gap" he's talking about the vast gulf that lies between physical phenomena like the firing of neurons and mental phenomena like the experience of the color red. At the present there's simply no explanation for how we get from one to the other.

Some contemporary philosophers who make much of the explanatory gap, including Levine, Galen Strawson, and, perhaps most famously, David Chalmers, are broadly sympathetic to ideas of philosophical naturalism.

Indeed, Levine puts forward a strong argument for a strictly materialist approach to mind in which conscious experiences somehow just are physical processes. His argument assumes that the physical causal order is closed and that our conscious experiences are causally efficacious, not mere by-products of our physical functioning like smoke from a fire. If we accept both of these apparently plausible assumptions, it follows that our conscious experiences are themselves physical phenomena.

Of course there's no reason to accept Levine's hypothesis other than an apriori metaphysical commitment to materialism. Blackford goes on to discuss the problem with Levine's view:

It is hard to define a sense in which conscious experiences are identical to physical phenomena such as neurological processes, but without any further twists that in itself might be a solvable conceptual problem. But there’s a further twist. As Levine also brings out in his discussion, physics as we currently understand it ultimately does no more than describe physical entities, structures, etc., and their dynamics. Understood in this way, a complete and ideal physics could account for all the motions and transformations of matter and energy that take place.

Indeed, it would account all the way up from the base level for the emergence and evolution of life, neurophysiological structures and processes, our bodily movements, and even for the things that we say to each other. The emergence of all these would ultimately be predicted by descriptions of physical structures together with the laws that describe their motions and transformations.

However, nothing in an ideal physics, so conceived, would enable us to deduce that human beings have inner experiences such as when I have an appearance of redness in my visual field, or a feeling of warmth and softness to my touch when I stroke my cat’s fur.

The emergence of such qualitative features of the world, or “qualia”, could not be predicted by a physical theory that merely specified physical structures and the laws governing their dynamics. When it comes to our conscious inner experiences, there seems to be a gap between the ultimate – or “lowest level” – physical description of reality and features of the world involving consciousness.

Is there a solution to the problem posed by qualia (and several other phenomena such as intentionality, restricted access, et al.)? Well, no, but maybe there will be in the future:

If we accept that this is a genuine problem, how do we solve it? Presumably we will need to enrich our fundamental world picture in some way. This could be done if our basic laws of physics were supplemented by psychophysical bridge principles that physical structures and processes generate the phenomena of consciousness.

Such bridge principles might be very difficult for limited beings like us to discover, but I don’t see why they couldn’t exist.

This is a bit odd. Blackford places his hope in difficult to discover bridge principles which could exist but for which there's no evidence. Yet as a materialist he's loath to consider that minds could exist - though they'd be difficult to discover - even though there's lots of evidence for them. Couldn't one say with Blackford, "I don't see why they couldn't exist"?

If we knew what [these bridge principles] were, we could give an explanation as to why some highly complex structures – such as the human brain – are conscious, while other structures are not. There might still be problems, however, in avoiding epiphenomenalism (the view that mind arises from the brain but cannot affect the brain). Would the new, enriched theory allow consciousness, in its turn, to act upon the physical world, as certainly seems to happen?

Or might we bite the bullet of epiphenomenalism once and for all, treating the apparent causal efficacy of consciousness as an illusion?

The problem seems intractable given materialism. Of course, dualists of one stripe or another, though not without difficulties of their own, nevertheless argue that the reality of consciousness implies that materialism is inadequate. The existence of consciousness suggests that in addition to our physical brains there's also something else about us, an immaterial substance (mind), that mediates conscious experience. Some philosophers have sought to solve the problem by simply denying that consciousness is a genuine reality, but Blackford will not have any of that nonsense:

Nonetheless, our own conscious experience cannot simply be waved away; in fact nothing is more real to us. Furthermore, it does seem difficult to understand its place in the order of the physical universe without some breakthrough in our understanding of physics itself. The explanatory gap identified by philosophers has to be explained, or explained away, if we want a satisfying account of the relationship between the physical world and our own inner lives.

Perhaps what he meant by that last sentence is "if we want a satisfying materialistic account...," but why should we insist that any account of reality be materialistic?

Not Just a Third World Problem

We like to think that when people immigrate to the U.S. or European countries from the third world that they leave behind some of the more barbaric of their customs and embrace a more enlightened set of cultural mores. Unfortunately, as this article points out, that's often not the case.

When Marie was two years old, a woman in her village in Africa cut off her clitoris and labia. Now 34 and living thousands of miles away in New York, she is still suffering.

“I have so many problems, with my husband, with sex, with childbirth,” she told NBC News, withholding her real name to protect her identity. “The consequences on my life are all negative, both physically and psychologically."

The practice of Female Genital Mutilation is common across much of Africa, where it is believed to ensure sexual purity before marriage. But Marie says FGM is also “very common” in some communities in America.

“The pressure to get daughters cut is great,” she said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 150,000 to 200,000 girls in the U.S. are at risk of being forced to undergo cutting. The CDC says “at risk” because there are no actual records of the practice, only estimates – and old estimates at that. Its latest data date to 1997, the year after it was banned in the U.S. But experts who work with victims and their communities say FGM is on the rise.

The article goes on to describe the various procedures that are employed and how extensive the practice is.

There are different degrees of FGM, the most severe form being the narrowing of the vaginal opening by repositioning the labia and stitching up the opening, sometimes leaving a hole the size of a matchstick for the passing of urine and menstrual flow.

The cutting is often carried out without anesthetic on girls between infancy and the age of eight. Victims can suffer numerous physical and mental health problems: severe abdominal pain, vaginal and pelvic infections, pain during sex, complications during childbirth.

And to what purpose is this horrific abuse inflicted on little girls? To insure that they have less motivation to be sexually unchaste and unfaithful to their husbands. It's ironic that left-wing media outlets like MSNBC and others tirelessly promote the myth that there's a Republican "war on women," a war that exists entirely in the imaginations of the folks who make the charge, while every day a real war on women is occurring in immigrant communities around this country about which the left, or at least much of it, has little or nothing to say. Why is that?

Autism

Pediatrician Russell Saunders at The Daily Beast discusses the very disturbing statistics on autism and asks the big question: What's causing it?

[T]he CDC now reports that autism spectrum disorders (ASD), comprising autism, unspecified pervasive developmental delay (PDD-NOS) and Asperger disorder, have risen from one case for every 88 children in 2008 to one in 68 as of 2010. This represents an increase of about 30%.

I spoke with a colleague who specializes in developmental pediatrics, who expressed a lack of surprise at these numbers. They continue a trend that has already been demonstrated in numerous prior epidemiological studies, though the exact cause continues to elude us. This study doesn’t say anything about what’s actually causing these increases.

What this new report tells us is “how much” and “who.” Breaking down the numbers, we see that white children are more likely to carry an ASD diagnosis than black or Hispanic children, and that there is a great deal of variation throughout the country. (The study used data collected from 11 states to extrapolate rates for the US as a whole.) Boys are much more likely to be affected than girls, and nearly half of diagnosed patients had at least average intelligence.

Of course, what we would most like to know is what’s responsible for the rise in autism. It’s very frustrating to see these data and have little explanation for them. For all the pseudoscience and controversy, one of the few things we can know with certainty is that vaccines aren’t responsible.

Whatever the cause of autism, emerging evidence points to it happening early in development. In the other big news of the week, a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine reports evidence of brain abnormalities in autistic patients that likely began before birth. Comparing postmortem tissue samples from children with ASD against tissues from unaffected children, researchers found disorganization in nerve cells in the former group, a change that likely started prenatally.

At least some of this is probably related to genetics. Beyond that, however, the “why” of autism remains unclear. What is encouraging, according to one of the study’s authors, is that the disorganization was only found in certain areas of the brain, indicating that therapy may help mitigate the effects of ASD.

Saunders has more at the link. Another question that probably concerns most readers is whether that 30% increase in cases in just two years means that autism is actually occurring more frequently or whether the frequency is about the same but parents are becoming much more aware and thus having their children checked more diligently.

I don't know the answer, but if it's the former then wouldn't it make sense to think that the cause is environmental rather than genetic?

Why Naturalism Is Self-Refuting

Over the last several decades a number of theistic philosophers have developed a powerful argument the conclusion of which is that naturalism - the view that material nature is all there is - is self-refuting. They argue that if we believe naturalism is true then we must believe that none of our beliefs, including our belief in naturalism, is trustworthy.

The foremost proponent of this argument has been Alvin Plantinga who presents a lecture on it here. The lecture is in six parts and is perhaps too long for those with limited time so as an alternative interested readers might check out this short summary:

Lest one criticize the video for its theistic bias against naturalism it might be mentioned that a lot of naturalists have implicitly and explicitly agreed with the thesis of the video. Evolutionary cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, has written that:

“Our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth; sometimes the truth is adaptive, sometimes it is not.”

As an example of how a false belief may have survival value, at least for our genes, imagine a prehistoric society in which a belief arises that the more children one has the greater will be one's reward in the afterlife. Such a belief would be expected to produce large numbers of progeny, and the factors responsible for it, if they're genetic, will, over the course of time, eventually dominate in the society. Yet the belief is false.

As Plantinga says, one can believe in natural selection or one can believe in naturalism, but one can't believe in both. If natural selection has produced our cognitive faculties in a way consonant with naturalism then those faculties evolved to promote survival not to ascertain truth. Thus we have no good reason to think that our belief in naturalism is true. On the other hand, if natural selection was superintended by an intelligent agent then we have reason to think that the process shaped our cognitive faculties to discern truth. That allows us to still believe in natural selection, but, of course, the existence of the intelligent agent means that naturalism is false.

Naturalism really is a philosophical dead end. It leads to epistemological and moral nihilism.

Marriage Inequality

Marriage inequality is much in the news today and our social commentators have a lot to say about it. Unfortunately, the kind of inequality they're most concerned about is not the inequality they should be concerned about.

While our culture agonizes over whether the tiny percentage of Americans that comprises the set of homosexual couples who desire to wed will be able to fulfill their dreams, it almost completely ignores the really insidious marriage inequality that is having a devastating effect on our social and economic well-being.

The inequality that matters, that threatens the very fabric of our society, is the inequality in marriage between the upper and lower classes in America.

R.R.Reno at First Things explains:

The children of wealthy people go to good schools, get good jobs, and get and stay married. Meanwhile, the rest struggle to get together, and if they do marry often end up divorced.

Charles Murray’s report on white America in Coming Apart gives us some of the vital statistics. In 1960, among top earners—the uppermost 20 percent—more than 90 percent of prime age white adults (30-49 years old) were married. Hardly any of them were divorced. The lives of the poor white population of America—the bottom 30 percent measured by income—wasn’t all that different. More than 80 percent of them were married, and although the number of divorced adults that age was a bit higher than among the well to do, it was only around 5 percent.

This relative equality is now long gone. Beginning in the 1970s, the top and bottom began to diverge. There’s been a downward drift in marriage among the rich, but not by much. Today 85 percent of prime age economic winners are married, a surprisingly modest decline given all the media attention to single professional women. Meanwhile, marriage has collapsed among the white poor. In 2010 less that 50 percent of prime aged poor whites were married. That’s partly because fewer get married, and partly because divorce rates skyrocketed—again, for them, but not for the rich.

Social scientists agree that family stability is a key factor—the key factor—for healthy, happy, successful lives. So our growing marriage inequality contributes to and reinforces the gap between winners and losers in America. Divorced and single people have more health problems. They’re more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Their self-reported happiness among unmarried adults is lower than for those in stable marriages. Moreover, marriage inequality means that poor kids are overwhelmingly more likely to grow up without a mother and father than rich kids, which as we know from social scientific studies foretells worst life outcomes for them.

This is not a problem that just affects "other people." The costs to taxpayers to subsidize chronic poverty and the sundry dysfunctions that arise from the fatherlessness that results from the disintegration of family are enormous. Fatherless boys are much less likely to do well in school and much more likely to wind up in prison than those with fathers. Fatherless girls are more likely to wind up raising their own children without fathers and thus more likely to be poor.

Moreover, children raised in stable, two-parent families often benefit not only from having the combined incomes of both parents but also from having two sets of grandparents. This support structure affords these children enormous financial advantages that children of single parents simply don't have.

If politicians and activists really feel strongly about the problem of marriage inequality in this country, that's the inequality they should take on. I suspect, though, that this kind of inequality is not a major concern to them. People who see the traditional family as an "oppressive" social institution, as do many of those who are most vocal about the injustice of marriage inequality, aren't going to be eager to strengthen it.

Heaven Help Us

When next you wonder why our government is dysfunctional and why the country is in the mess it's in just recall that we live in a nation which repeatedly elects to the House, Senate, and White House people like Sen. Barbara Boxer, and then all will be clear. Ms Boxer, weighing in on the case before the Supreme Court in which the government is seeking to compel businesses to provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients for their employees even though the employers believe that this is tantamount to providing their employees with the means to commit murder, seems oblivious to the distinction between drugs which kill embryos and drugs which enable males to perform sexually. Nor does she seem aware that very few insurance policies cover the latter. Watch the video and then read Ed Morrissey's commentary below:

First and foremost, Viagra (and other erectile-dysfunction drugs and treatments) aren’t widely covered by insurance. That’s one reason why a large online market for inexpensive purchases of the drugs exist.

Second, as anyone who gives a moment’s thought about the subject would realize, such drugs would be appropriate to help empower natural procreation, which isn’t against anyone’s religion, last I checked. Lastly, and this is a more minor point, Boxer ignorantly invokes the Catholicism of the plaintiffs in this court hearing, when none of them are actually Catholic.

The religious objection is to contraception and sterilization, and in the Hobby Lobby case, it’s narrowed to a specific kind of contraception — abortifacients. Boxer blithely dismisses the distinction and blathers about the employer taking away the woman’s right to choose her form of contraception — which is nonsense. Just because an employer refuses to subsidize that choice does not mean they are forbidding it or blocking access to it. It’s the same kind of “war on women” double-talk that assumes that employers have total control over the private choices of their employees, when the existence of an independent salary demonstrates the exact opposite. No one gets paid in company scrip any longer, and haven’t for a century or so.

Ms. Boxer's stunning foray into what is apparently for her the terra incognita of informed thought on these matters follows hard upon Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee's astonishing revelation that the Constitution is a 400 year-old document.

The charitable thing to do, perhaps, would be to avert one's eyes from Ms. Boxer and Ms. Lee as they undertake to publicly embarrass themselves. Unfortunately, they're a United States Senator and a United States Congresswoman and are making decisions that affect our lives in very critical ways, and it would be irresponsible to ignore their inexcusable ignorance. The people of the United States need representatives in Congress who possess at the least a passing familiarity with the matters upon which they hold forth.

Ultimately, of course, the blame rests with the voters who keep reelecting to office people who have no business being there. Whatever are we thinking?

Cosmic Inflation

Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll at The Opinionator, a New York Times blog, gives us a very readable, very helpful explanation of the cosmological theories called cosmic inflation and the multiverse. These have been in the news recently because of the possible discovery of gravitational waves predicted by inflation theory.

Carroll is excited by this because, like many scientists, he's disturbed by the extraordinary fine-tuning that the early universe must have exhibited if inflation never happened. Since fine-tuning points to a cosmic designer, and since Carroll is an atheist who desires that the universe be completely natural, he's emotionally and intellectually invested in inflation theory.

Here are a few excerpts from the essay:

The Hot Big Bang model, which posits that the early universe was hot, dense, and rapidly expanding, is an excellent fit to cosmological data. But it starts by assuming that the distribution of matter began in an incredibly smooth configuration, distributed nearly homogeneously through space. That state of affairs appears to be extremely unnatural. Of all the ways matter could have been distributed, the overwhelming majority are wildly lumpy, with dramatically different densities from place to place. The initial conditions of the universe seem uncanny, or “finely tuned,” not at all as if they were set at random.

Good scientific theories can fit all the data but still seem unsatisfying to us.

If the Standard Big Bang model fits all the data and is simpler than the inflation model, why posit the inflation model?

The problem is that the universe displays a smooth distribution of matter and energy which is extraordinarily improbable if the origin of the universe is a random event. The inflation hypothesis is a way to escape the conclusion that this smoothness was somehow not random. In the first trillionth, trillionth, trillionth of a second of the universe's existence some unknown force, perhaps negative gravity, inflated the universe to a vast size almost instantly smoothing it out like an inflating balloon smooths out the wrinkles in the latex:

Alan Guth’s proposal (in the 1980s) was that the extremely early universe was dominated for a time by a mysterious form of energy that made it expand at a super-accelerated rate, before that energy later converted into ordinary particles of matter and radiation. We don’t know exactly what the source of that energy was, but physicists have a number of plausible candidates; in the meantime we simply call it “the inflaton.”

Unlike matter, which tends to clump together under the force of gravity, the inflaton works to stretch out space and make the distribution of energy increasingly smooth. By the time the energy in the inflaton converts into regular particles, we are left with a hot, dense, smooth early universe: exactly what is needed to get the Big Bang model off the ground. If inflation occurred, the smoothness of the early universe is the most natural thing in the world.

The inflaton, in other words, is a source of energy that hasn't been observed or measured but which is hypothesized to have existed in order to avoid the metaphysical implications of an extraordinarily improbable distribution of mass-energy at the origin of the universe.

Inflation has become a starting point for much contemporary theorizing about the beginning of the universe. Cosmologists either work to elaborate the details of the model, or struggle to find a viable alternative. Which is why excitement was so high last week when cosmologists announced that they had found the imprint of primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. These gravitational waves are a direct prediction of inflation. Before last week, our reliable knowledge of the universe stretched back to about one second after the Big Bang; this observation pushes our reach back to one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

Cosmic inflation is an extraordinary extrapolation. And it was motivated not by any direct contradiction between theory and experiment, but by the simple desire to have a more natural explanation for the conditions of the early universe. If these observations favoring inflation hold up — a big “if,” of course — it will represent an enormous triumph for reasoning based on the search for naturalness in physical explanations.

It seems that the only reason for suggesting that this immense expansion occurred and that it was caused by a force that science has no other reason to think exists, is the desire to avoid any non-naturalistic entities involved in the creation. Carroll acknowledges, however, that even if inflation should turn out to be the case it only pushes the problem of fine-tuning back a step:

The triumph, unfortunately, is not a completely clean one. If inflation occurs, the conditions we observe in the early universe are completely natural. But is the occurrence of inflation itself completely natural?

That depends. The original hope was that inflation would naturally arise as the early universe expanded and cooled, or perhaps that it would simply start somewhere (even if not everywhere) as a result of chaotically fluctuating initial conditions. But closer examination reveals that inflation itself requires a very specific starting point — conditions that, one must say, appear to be quite delicately tuned and unnatural. From this perspective, inflation by itself doesn’t fully explain the early universe; it simply changes the kind of explanation we are seeking.

Carroll goes on to explain how inflation may lead to a multiverse, another hypothesis advanced primarily to avoid the fact that much of the rest of the cosmos also seems to be fine-tuned for life. Such precision is literally incredible if our universe is the only universe and if it arose by chance. But if ours is just one of an infinite number of different universes then ours becomes not only more likely but actually inevitable.

Fortunately — maybe — there is a complication. Soon after Guth proposed inflation, the physicists Alexander Vilenkin and Andrei Linde pointed out that the process of inflation can go on forever. Instead of the inflaton energy converting into ordinary particles all throughout the universe, it can convert in some places but not others, creating localized “Big Bangs.” Elsewhere inflation continues, eventually producing other separate “universes,” eventually an infinite number. From an attempt to explain conditions in the single universe that we see, cosmologists end up predicting a “multiverse.”

This may sound like a very peculiar result. But in the news conference after last week’s announcement, both Guth and Linde suggested that evidence for inflation boosts the case for the multiverse. And perhaps the multiverse repays the favor. The fundamental laws of physics obey the principles of quantum mechanics: Rather than predicting definite outcomes, we attach probabilities to members of an ensemble of many different experimental outcomes.

If inflation begins in any part of this quantum ensemble, and that inflation goes on forever, it creates an infinite number of individual universes. So even if inflation itself seems unlikely, multiplying by the infinite number of universes it creates makes it quite plausible that we find ourselves in a post-inflationary situation.

This sounds a bit circular to the layman. A highly improbable inflation produces the multiverse, and the multiverse makes inflation a near certainty. Carroll himself seems a bit abashed by the reasoning:

If you find the logic of the previous paragraph less than perfectly convincing, you are not alone. Not that it is obviously wrong; but it’s not obviously right, either. The multiverse idea represents a significant shift in the philosophy underlying inflation: Rather than explaining why we live precisely in this kind of universe, eternal inflation admits there are many kinds of local universes, and expresses the hope that ones like ours are more likely than other kinds.

I think that last sentence gives the game away. Inflation is based on little more than a hope that somehow the universe can be explained without recourse to an intelligent designer.

In any case, Carroll has more to say on these matters at the link. It really is a good article, not only because it explains some very abstruse concepts in easy-to-understand fashion, but also because it's a nice illustration of how scientists, far from being the objective pursuers of the truth wherever it may lie, are really driven by metaphysical and religious commitments that dictate what theories they'll consider and which ones they won't.