Why Do Conservatives Tend to Be Happier?

When I was in college back in the 60s some of my profs, who were men of the left, repeatedly insinuated that to be a conservative was to be mean-spirited, ungenerous, bigoted and miserable. In the years since a number of sociologists decided to test this intuition, and to the surprise of many, perhaps, it turned out to be baseless.

In fact, the opposite is true. The misery, studies show, is largely on the left.

An article by Ross Pomeroy at Real Clear Science gives us the details:

It may be one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction.

So, why is this? How do social scientists explain it?

There are a couple clear contributors to point out first. Marriage tends to make people happier, and conservatives are more likely to be married. Religious belief is also linked to happiness, and conservatives tend to be more religious.

Social psychologist Jaime Napier, Program Head of Psychology at NYU-Abu Dhabi has conducted research suggesting that views about inequality play a role.

"One of the biggest correlates with happiness in our surveys was the belief of a meritocracy, which is the belief that anybody who works hard can make it," she told PBS.

"That was the biggest predictor of happiness. That was also one of the biggest predictors of political ideology. So, the conservatives were much higher on these meritocratic beliefs than liberals were."

To paraphrase, conservatives are less concerned with equality of outcomes and more with equality of opportunity. While American liberals are depressed by inequalities in society, conservatives are okay with them provided that everyone has roughly the same opportunities to succeed.

The latter is a more rosy and empowering view than the deterministic former.

But there's more:

Two other studies explored a more surprising contributor: neuroticism, typically defined as "a tendency toward anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and other negative feelings." Surveyed conservatives consistently score lower in neuroticism than surveyed liberals.

As a friend of mine pointed out, conservatives are not nearly as neurotic about a climate apocalypse or "masking" as are liberals. Nor do they think that Donald Trump, with all his manifold flaws, is the antichrist.

Pomeroy continues:

In 2011, psychologists at the University of Florida and the University of Toronto conducted four studies, aiming to find whether conservatives are more "positively adjusted" than liberals.

They found that conservatives "expressed greater personal agency, more positive outlook, more transcendent moral beliefs, and a generalized belief in fairness" compared to liberals.

They added:

The portrait of conservatives that emerges is different from the view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality. Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general... report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems (all after controlling for age, sex, income, and education), and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity.

Liberals have become less happy over the last several decades, but this decline is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions.

Anecdotally, I've also found that conservatives are much more likely to indulge in self-deprecating humor than are liberals. I've known very few liberals who could laugh at their own personal foibles or who would get angry if it were suggested that they had any.

In fact, for not a few, their laughter was usually derisive and directed at others with whom they felt contempt.

It might be added here that contempt for others is unfortunately a common human trait, but it seems, in my experience, at least, to be particularly so among those on the left.

In 2014 then Democratic governor of New York, Mario Cuomo told conservative Republicans – specifically anyone who is pro-traditional marriage, pro-life or pro-guns – they “have no place in the state of New York".

In 2016 Democrat candidate for president Hillary Clinton famously called Donald Trump supporters "deplorables."

The current governor of New York, Democrat Kathy Hochul, recently encouraged Republicans to “Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, OK?” she said. “You are not New Yorkers," and Florida gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist implied that those who support his opponent Ron DeSantis are haters and that he didn't want their vote.

It's not hard to imagine Donald Trump talking about his political opponents like this, but then that's why so many consider Trump and the words he employs to be despicable. It's no less despicable when it comes from the left.

John Fetterman and Women's Choices

What should we think of a politician who adamantly refuses to support helping poor families send their children to decent schools but who sends his own children to one of the best private schools in the state? What word best describes such a politico? "Confused"? "Inconsistent"? "Ironic"? "Hypocritical"?

Trying to come up with the kindest and yet most accurate word is not easy, but it's the challenge that faces anyone who reads this article in the Washington Free Beacon on Democratic senatorial candidate John Fetterman whom we talked about in yesterday's post.

The article, by Chuck Ross, begins with this:

Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D.) opposes vouchers that let children in failing public school districts attend private and charter schools. But the progressive champion, who lives in one of Pennsylvania’s worst performing school districts, sends his kids to an elite prep school.

Fetterman’s kids attend the Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, where parents pay up to $34,250 for a "dynamic" learning environment and an "innovative" approach to teaching.

They would otherwise go to schools in Woodland Hills School District, where graduation rates are far below the state average. The local elementary school that serves Fetterman’s town of Braddock is in the bottom 15 percent of the state in academic performance....

[Fetterman] has ... called for increased funding for public schools, though by sending his kids to private school he is diverting funds from Woodland Hills under a state funding formula that awards money to districts based on enrollment.

Fetterman’s children will likely benefit academically from attending Winchester Thurston, though they will be deprived of the racial diversity Fetterman claims to embrace. Woodland Hills is 62 percent black and 25 percent white. Just 36 percent of Winchester Thurston’s students are minorities, though the school has a fully staffed "equity and inclusion" office.

Winchester Thurston has a 100 percent college acceptance rate, and an average SAT score of 1330, well above state averages. Woodland Hills, the district the Fetterman kids would otherwise attend, has just an 85 percent high school graduation rate, far below the state average. Woodland Hills has a 75 percent minority student body.

David P. Hardy, a distinguished senior fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation and co-founder of Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia charter school notes that, "Fetterman could send his kids to [Woodland Hills], but he's got money, so he can send them somewhere else, but the poor people there are stuck going to those schools, and he doesn't give them any way out."

Opposition to vouchers and indeed to any alternative to public schools is opposed by teacher's unions and the Democrat party, both of which claim to be champions of the poor, yet most poor people, and most Americans in general, support school choice:

Fifty-eight percent of Americans—and 69 percent of black voters—say they support vouchers, which have been linked to higher graduation rates. The Pennsylvania State Education Association endorsed Fetterman earlier this year, lauding him for "oppos[ing] tuition voucher programs."

Fetterman touted the union’s endorsement, saying he is "a proud product of Pennsylvania public schools."

The union in April blasted a Republican effort to provide vouchers for families in districts in the bottom 15 percent of the state. The voucher program would benefit students in districts like Woodland Hills, which has three elementary schools that fit that criteria.

Fetterman is certainly not alone among Democrats who oppose school choice but who send their own children to private schools. The Obamas did it, the Clintons did it, the Bidens did it and so did the Pelosis, just to name a few:

Rep. Elaine Luria (D., Va.) has spoken out against school vouchers and charter schools but sent her daughter to a private middle school and served on the board of a private high school, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

House candidate Christina Bohannan (D., Iowa) has criticized school choice while sending her daughter to a private school so she could receive a "personalized education."

It's ironic that Democrats are committed to making sure that women be given the choice to kill their children in the womb and will subsidize both the procedure that does so and any travel expenses the woman incurs. But they will not lift a finger to help poor and middle class women have the choice to send their children to schools where they can actually learn something.

Maybe another question Mr. Fetterman should be required to answer in the current senatorial campaign, in addition to the questions suggested in yesterday's post is, why does he support a woman's right to choose to abort her child's life, but not a woman's right to choose where to send her child to school?

Would John Fetterman Make a Good Senator?

Some very important elections are scheduled in the U.S. this November. Among the most important are elections in several states for the office of United States Senator, and one of the most critical of those elections is the one in Pennsylvania which pits the current Lieutenant Governor, Democrat John Fetterman, against Republican Mehmet Oz.

It's possible that the party which controls the Senate going forward will hinge on who wins this election in PA.

Oz is a very accomplished medical doctor but has been a rather lackluster campaigner so far. He's also something of a carpetbagger, having moved to PA from New Jersey in order to run for the Senate.

Fetterman, on the other hand, has adopted the Biden strategy of campaigning hardly at all, which is probably smart because the last thing he needs is for people to start asking him questions about his record.

The most impressive thing about Mr. Fetterman is his size (6'8", 300+ lbs.). After that one looks in vain to find anything which commends him to a voter looking for some indication of achievement.

Consider this from The Washington Free Beacon:

As mayor of Braddock, Pa., [Braddock has a population of 2000 so being elected mayor is no great accomplishment] Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D.) ordered a police officer to dig up dirt on one of his political rivals, according to a town solicitor whom Fetterman later fired.

In a heated 2009 mayoral campaign, Braddock solicitor Lawrence Shields accused Fetterman of "abuse of your mayoral authority" for ordering a Braddock cop to obtain a police report from a 2004 domestic incident involving Fetterman’s challenger, Jayme Cox.

Braddock city council members called for Fetterman’s arrest for violating state laws regarding the handling of criminal information in cases where charges are dropped.

Three years later, Fetterman cast the tie-breaking vote—his only vote in 13 years as Braddock mayor—to fire Shields as solicitor, purportedly to save money in the borough’s budget.

Fetterman said he was an "enthusiastic yes" in favor of ousting Shields.

The incident is another black mark on Fetterman’s tenure as mayor of the dilapidated steel town, which the progressive candidate has touted on the campaign trail as evidence of his blue collar bona fides.

Fetterman admitted to asking a police officer for the report on Cox and discussing it with others. But he denied pressuring the officer to dig up the information and said it was necessary to inform voters about Cox, who had charges dropped after taking a domestic abuse class.

Fetterman also faced allegations from city officials of failing to perform his duties as mayor.

He missed more than one-third of council meetings during his tenure, the Free Beacon reported. Jesse Brown, the president of the city council when Fetterman was in office, said he "should have been at all council meetings" but stopped showing up after multiple confrontations over his official duties.

One of the most damaging facts in Mr. Fetterman's record is an incident that occurred in 2013 that has resonances with the Ahmaud Aubery killing:

In 2013, Fetterman pointed a shotgun at an unarmed black jogger he wrongly suspected of firing a gun near his house. The jogger, Christopher Miyares, said Fetterman aimed a shotgun at his chest. Fetterman admitted in a television interview that he "may have broken the law," but he has refused to apologize for the incident.

At The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro calls Fetterman a "Professionally Useless Person," by which he means that he's managed to rise to prominence without ever having had a real job or actually done much of anything:

Fetterman served as the mayor of Braddock — an impoverished city of fewer than 2,000 people — for more than a decade on a salary of $1,800 because his parents gave him an allowance of tens of thousands of dollars per year. Meanwhile, his sister allowed him to rent an apartment virtually for free.

It's also worthy of note that Mr. Fetterman is an enthusiastic supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders and his socialist policies:

“In 2016, Fetterman signed a pledge to support the so-called 'Keep It in the Ground Act,' which was designed to ban new oil, gas, and coal leasing on federal land,” Shapiro said.

“He has pushed repeatedly for pardons or commutations for violent felons. He said Pennsylvania could release one-third of its inmates and be just as safe.”

Indeed, Fetterman has repeatedly nodded to drug decriminalization and monitored injection sites, as well as defended Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who is currently under investigation from Republican and Democratic members of the Pennsylvania House for failing to enforce the city’s laws.

Shortly before his primary, Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke which causes him to slur his speech, repeat himself and makes it difficult for him to maintain his train of thought. This probably accounts for why he only rarely does public appearances.

His campaign has produced several ads mocking Oz, fairly, for being a New Jersey resident who moved to Pennsylvania for the senate race, but he himself is vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy, having taken "a vacation to the Jersey Shore — security team in tow — all while telling Americans to continue locking down,” Shapiro observed.

At the moment Fetterman is polling four points ahead of Oz, which is within the margin of error, but it'll be interesting to see whether that lead holds up once facts about his record, or lack thereof, become more widely known.

One thing that might close the gap would be Mr. Fetterman's response were he forced to answer five questions:

• Mr. Fetterman, do you believe men can get pregnant?
• Can you tell us what a woman is?
• Do you believe biological males should be allowed to compete against females in women's sports?
• If that black jogger you once held at gunpoint had decided to ignore you and keep on jogging, what would you have done?
• Would you have threatened him with that shotgun were he a white jogger?

The first three questions would force him to choose between his progressive social positions and the convictions of a majority of PA voters. The last two questions would make his action appear to have been clearly motivated by racial prejudice.

The Multiverse and the God of the Gaps

One criticism of Intelligent Design (ID) theory (the theory that the universe and life were engineered by an intelligent agent or mind) is that it's a "God-of-the-Gaps" hypothesis. This is a derisive criticism of any theory that purports to use God as an explanation for any gap in our knowledge of how something happened.

For instance, we have no idea how life could have started, so, the criticism goes, ID theorists conclude it must have been started by God.

This is, however, a caricature of ID which is based not on what we don't know but on what we do know. We know, for example, that information wherever we encounter it, in books, on signs, in signals, in codes, on DVDs, wherever, is always the product of intelligent minds. We also know that information is never produced by random, mindless processes like wind or gravity or chemical reactions.

Thus, the most plausible explanation for the information in the first living cell, the information encoded on its replication machinery, is that it was the product of a mind. This is not claiming to be a proof but rather an inference to the most likely explanation.

One place scientists encounter an extraordinary indication that a mind has been at work is the astonishing fine-tuning of the forces and constants that make up the fabric of the universe. If any of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of these parameters had deviated from its actual value by incredibly tiny amounts (like one part in 10^120) either the universe wouldn't exist or no higher life forms could arise or survive in it.

In order to avoid the conclusion that this breathtaking evidence of design is really not a result of an intentional agent some scientists have proposed the multiverse hypothesis. This idea posits the existence of an infinity of universes, all different, and all isolated from each other (Picture a vast bubble bath where each bubble is a discrete universe).

In such a multitude of different universes every possible universe will exist, just like if you were dealt an infinite number of poker hands you're bound to be dealt a royal flush at some point.*

Since our universe is certainly a possible universe, our universe, as improbable as it is, as astonishingly fine-tuned as it is, must exist, and we just happen to inhabit it.

So what are we to think of these ideas? In this short video, scientist and philosopher Kirk Durston suggests that the answer to that question is, "not much." Check it out:

*Actually if you're dealt an infinite number of hands then you'd be dealt an infinity of royal flushes, but let's not get bogged down in the arcana of infinity.

How The Sexual Revolution Harms Women

U.K. journalist Louise Perry, author of the forthcoming The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, has a piece in the Wall Street Journal that should be read by every young woman and maybe every young man, too.

Unfortunately, The WSJ requires a subscription to read most of their content, but sometimes they allow a few articles to be accessed for free.

In any case, I've highlighted several of the more important parts of her column which is titled, "How the Sexual Revolution Has Hurt Women." Ms.Perry writes:

Critics of free-market capitalism have observed that the pleasures of freedom are not equally available to all....the group of people who have done particularly well from the free-marketization of sex are men high in the personality trait that psychologists call “sociosexuality”: the desire for sexual variety.

The standard questionnaire used by researchers to assess sociosexuality asks respondents how many different partners they have had sex with in the past 12 months, how many partners they have had sex with on only one occasion, and how often they have spontaneous fantasies about having sex with someone they just met, among other questions.

Men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, while the vast majority of women, if given the option, prefer a committed relationship to casual sex. Sex buyers are almost exclusively male, and men watch a lot more pornography than women do.

Men and women also differ dramatically in their baseline levels of sexual disgust, with women much more likely to be revolted by the prospect of someone they find unattractive.

Disgust induces a physiological response that can be measured through heart and respiration rate, blood pressure and salivation, although the individual may not be aware of these indicators, and studies find that, on average, the sexual disgust threshold is much lower for women than it is for men.

Being groped in a crowd, or leered at while traveling alone, or propositioned a little too forcefully in a bar—all of these situations can provoke this horrible emotion.

It is an emotion that women in the sex industry are forced to repress. In fact, as the prostitution survivor Rachel Moran has written, the ability not to cry or vomit in response to sexual fear and disgust is one of the essential “skills” demanded by the industry.

It is crucial to remember that the sociosexuality difference between the sexes is an average one: There are some women who are exceptionally high in sociosexuality, and there are some men who are low in it.

Much of this is well-known, of course, although many feminists have tried to gloss over the differences and portray women as just as "sociosexual" as men. One tragic result is the "hookup" culture:

In the West, hookup culture is normative among adolescents and young adults. Although it is possible for young women to opt out, research suggests that only a minority do.

Absent some kind of religious commitment, this is now the “normal” route presented to girls as they become sexually active. And hookup culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex.

In a sexual marketplace in which such a culture prevails, a woman who refuses to participate puts herself at a disadvantage. As one group of researchers put it, “some individual women may be capitulating to men’s preferences for casual sexual encounters because, if they do not, someone else will.”

Yet studies consistently find that following hookups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress. Female pleasure is rare during casual sex....Instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant sex out of a sense of obligation.

If you’re a young woman launched into a sexual culture that is fundamentally not geared toward protecting your safety or well-being, in which you are considered valuable only in a very narrow, physical sense, and if your basic options seem to be either hooking up or celibacy, then a comforting myth of “agency” can be attractive.

But this myth depends on naiveté about the nature of male sexuality. Too many young women today ignore the fact that men are generally much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much easier to regard their sexual partners as disposable.

Too many fail to recognize that being desired by men is not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem.

It isn’t nice to think of oneself as disposable or to acknowledge that other people view you that way. It’s easier to turn away from any acknowledgment of what is really going on, at least temporarily.

I’ve spoken to many women who participated in hookup culture when they were young and years later came to realize just how unhappy it made them. As one friend put it, “I told myself so many lies, so many lies."

If you’re a woman who’s had casual sexual relationships with men in the past, you might try answering the following questions as honestly as you can: Did you consider your virginity to be an embarrassing burden you wanted to be rid of? Do you ever feel disgusted when you think about consensual sexual experiences you’ve had in the past?

Have you ever become emotionally attached to a casual sexual partner and concealed this attachment from him? Have you ever done something sexually that you found painful or unpleasant and concealed this discomfort from your partner, either during sex or afterward?

If you answer “no” to all of these questions, your high sociosexuality and good luck have allowed you to navigate successfully a treacherous sexual marketplace. But if you answer “yes” to any of them, you are entitled to feel angry at a sexual culture that set you up to fail.

If men and women are psychologically the same why do so many women feel guilt and so few men do? Why do women often feel uised and men rarely do? It seems that women have much to lose in the "hookup" culture and nothing much to gain.

Today’s sexual culture however, prefers to understand people as freewheeling, atomized individuals, all looking out for number one and all up for a good time. It assumes that if all sexual taboos were removed, we would all be liberated and capable of making entirely free choices about our sexual lives, sampling from a menu of delightful options made newly available by the sexual revolution.

In fact, our choices are severely constrained, because we are impressionable creatures who absorb the values and ideas of our surrounding culture. If I am, for instance, a young female student looking for a boyfriend at my 21st-century university, and I don’t want to have sex before marriage, then I will find my options limited in a way that they wouldn’t have been in 1950.

The revolution in sexuality has put young women in a very difficult spot:

When sex before marriage is expected, and when almost all of the other women participating in my particular sexual market are willing to have sex on a first or second date, then not being willing to do the same becomes a competitive disadvantage.

The abstinent young woman must either be tremendously attractive, in order to out-compete her more permissive peers, or she must be content to restrict her dating pool to those men who are as unusual as she is. Being eccentric carries costs.

So who are the winners in all this? It's certainly not young women.

It's a biological fact that, on average, men are innately more promiscuous than women. Men must be taught from the time they're young, preferably by their father, to value one woman above others, to value their children and to value their home.

Women, on the other hand, must be taught that if they want their man to suppress his innate desire to wander she must show him that she values him as a man, a provider and a protector.

None of that is easy in a culture in which so many children grow up fatherless, surrounded by sexual stimuli and voices telling them that "women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle," but it's the most reliable way for women, men and children to achieve happiness and self-respect.

Ms. Perry concludes with this:

The word “chivalry” is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what we need.

As the feminist theorist Mary Harrington writes: “‘Chivalrous’ social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist.

But…the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.”

Sam Harris' Dreadful Argument

Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape, among other works, has caused a minor kerfuffle for essentially exclaiming on a recent podcast that virtually any act of deception or, if we're to follow his logic to its conclusion, any act at all, is justified if it keeps Donald Trump from being re-elected president:

Podcast host Sam Harris raised eyebrows on Twitter this week for saying that he believes the danger posed to "democracy" by former President Trump is so much greater than any potential corruption involving the Biden family that: "Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared."

Trump poses such a grave threat to the nation that all the rules of fairness and justice must be suspended to stop him. All the institutions, like the FBI and the media, must sacrifice whatever's left of their reputations and integrity in order to deceive the American public into opposing this man.

Harris also suggested that the peril a second Trump presidency poses to our democracy is analogous to an asteroid about to strike the earth: "If there was an asteroid hurdling [sic] towards Earth, and we got in a room together with all our friends about what we could do to deflect the course -- is that a conspiracy?"

From the link:

[Donald Trump is] unfit for office in every possible way. It is not that he has just got a few screws loose, every screw is loose. Every screw you would want totally cranked down is loose or nonexistent in him.

So yes, that's my argument. My argument is that it was appropriate for Twitter and the heads of big tech and the head of journalistic organizations to feel like they were in the presence of something like a once-in-a-lifetime moral emergency, right?

This is not the same thing as not liking George W. Bush or not liking John McCain or not liking Mitt Romney for their politics. Here's a guy who is capable of anything, right? He's not ideological, but he is a black hole of selfishness, so there's no telling what he is going to do, and we can not afford to have four more years with this guy.

So what should well-intentioned people do who have a lot of power in these ways? If you're running the New York Times, CNN, or Twitter? Should they conspire to do that under these conditions?

Harris insists that the Hunter Biden laptop, despite what it tells us about the corruption of the Biden family, including the president, is not at all a concern of his compared to the horror of re-electing Trump:

"Listen, I don't care what's in Hunter Biden's laptop, I mean, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared," he declared.

"Whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right, or China, it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in," Harris explained.

For Harris, who's a moral utilitarian, the ends justify the means, and the end of keeping Donald Trump out of the White House apparently justifies any means, no matter how devastating they may be to our polity in the long run.

There are a few things to say about this.

First of all Harris' position is absurd, especially so for one who has written books on morality. If any means are justified would Mr. Harris condone assassination if that were the only way to prevent a second Trump term?

I'm sure he would deny condoning killing the man, but what non-arbitrary grounds has he left himself for doing so? The moral legitimacy of assassination certainly follows from what he stated in his podcast.

Secondly, he claims that Mr. Trump's corruption is beyond the pale, but does he know something that most of us don't? He mentions Trump University which is surely egregious, but is it worse for our national security and economic well-being than being in the pay of the communist Chinese as Hunter informs us his father was?

It's not clear what other corruption Trump is guilty of that would warrant the comparison to an earth-bound asteroid. He's been impeached twice and vindicated both times. The January 6th committee is striving to find something, anything, that he can be indicted on, but so far the most their investigations have revealed is that Mr. Trump is an odious, irresponsible narcissist.

These are unpleasant character traits, to be sure, but they're not criminal, nor do they come as news to anybody who's been paying attention for the last five years.

Lastly, utilitarians like Mr. Harris insist that the right act is the act which produces the greatest balance of happiness over unhappiness, but despite its popularity, this is a bankrupt ethics. His podcast illustrates one reason why.

In order to assess which act will produce the greatest balance of happiness over unhappiness one has to know all the facts about a matter, including what the eventual consequences of an act will be. Does Mr. Harris know what will be the long term consequences to American democracy if we prostitute and pervert our institutions in order to prevent Mr. Trump's re-election?

Does he know for a fact that we'd all be better off if the media, congress and the FBI lied, perjured themselves, libeled and prosecuted innocent people, as they've already done, in order to prevent Mr. Trump's return to the White House?

I feel safe in saying that the answer to these questions is an obvious "No, Mr. Harris has no idea what the consequences would be."

Thinking such as that offered us by Mr. Harris is itself extremely dangerous to a democracy, which relies on trust between a people and their government. When trust is gone a democracy will unravel and there's precious little trust left now as it is.

Sadly, Mr. Harris and those who agree with him are willing to obliterate what little there is left.

Did the Big Bang Really Not Happen?

There's a fascinating article at iai News by cosmologist Eric Lerner in which Lerner argues that the James Webb telescope is confirming the hypothesis that the Big Bang theory of cosmogenesis is wrong.

There's a lot to the article and anyone interested in how the universe began should read the whole thing, but Lerner opens with this:

To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising—not at all what was predicted by theory.

In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones.

One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”

Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The ...hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since.

Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”

Big Bang cosmologists are having sleepless nights because, as Lerner pointed out, the images of galaxies that the Webb telescope are sending back are showing that the galaxies are too small, too smooth and too old for the Big Bang to have occurred.

But why does their size, smoothness and age preclude the Big Bang? Lerner explains:

Let’s begin with “too small”. If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance.

Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.)

In other words, since we're seeing them as they were billions of years ago when, if space is expanding, they were closer to us, they should appear larger just as objects do when they're closer than when they're further away.

But they don't appear larger, they appear smaller just as would be expected if space were not expanding.

Smaller and smaller is exactly what the JWST images show.

....This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe....Put another way, the galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.

Lerner explains this in more detail in the article, but what does smoothness have to do with this? Big Bang theorists speculated that many galaxies have actually grown over time due to collisions with other galaxies, but the smoothness revealed by the Webb telescope seems to rule this out:

....theorists have speculated that the tiny galaxies grow up into present day galaxies by colliding with each other—merging to become more spread out.....[and] Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers.

What the JWST actually showed [however] was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today’s galaxies....In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory.

....Tiny and smooth galaxies mean no expansion and thus no Big Bang.

If the universe is not expanding then there was no initial Big Bang.

The age of the galaxies seen by Webb is also a problem for the standard big bang model of the origin of the universe:

According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old.

Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur.

Lerner also cites the sheer number of very distant galaxies which must've formed impossibly early after the initial cosmic expansion as evidence that the Big Bang never happened:

Just as there must be no galaxies older than the Big Bang, if the Big Bang hypothesis were valid, so theorists expected that as the JWST looked out further in space and back in time, there would be fewer and fewer galaxies and eventually none—a Dark Age in the cosmos.

But a paper to be published in Nature demonstrates that galaxies as massive as the Milky Way are common even a few hundred million years after the hypothesized Bang.

The authors state that the new images show that there are at least 100,000 times as many galaxies as theorists predicted at redshifts more than 10. There is no way that so many large galaxies can be generated in so little time, so again-- no Big Bang.

There's more to Lerner's argument at the link - he argues, for example, that, based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one - but one of the most interesting aspects of the piece is the reaction to the scientific establishment at having one of its most cherished theories challenged.

Lerner discusses the censorship and suppression of ideas which conflict with the standard explanations of the origin of the cosmos and his account sounds very similar to what those who challenge the evolutionary paradigm of the origin of life experience.

Perhaps the scientific establishment feels the earth moving under their feet. Not only is it cosmologists who are experiencing panic and sleepless nights, but so too may many Darwinians in various scientific disciplines be experiencing the high anxiety that accompanies the horrible realization that one's entire life's work was all wrong and a complete waste.

Do Minds Come from Matter?

Physicist Adam Frank had an interesting essay at Aeon a few years ago in which he discusses some of the problems quantum physics poses for materialism.

Materialism is the view that everything is reducible to matter (and energy), and, of course, if everything is reducible to matter then there's no immaterial mental substance, no mind or soul that's not somehow a product of the material brain. Our physical, material selves are all there is to us.

Materialism, however, bears the burden of several very serious difficulties, including the following three: 1) No one knows what matter is; 2) Some popular interpretations of quantum mechanics seem to entail that matter is just a wave function, a mathematical posit, that has no objective existence; And 3) the most significant feature of minds - consciousness - seems inexplicable on any materialist ontology.

Here are some excerpts from what Frank says about this:

Materialism holds the high ground these days in debates over that most ultimate of scientific questions: the nature of consciousness. When tackling the problem of mind and brain, many prominent researchers advocate for a universe fully reducible to matter. ‘Of course you are nothing but the activity of your neurons,’ they proclaim.

That position seems reasonable and sober in light of neuroscience’s advances, with brilliant images of brains lighting up like Christmas trees while test subjects eat apples, watch movies or dream. And aren’t all the underlying physical laws already known?

....In the very public version of the debate over consciousness, those who advocate that understanding the mind might require something other than a ‘nothing but matter’ position are often painted as victims of wishful thinking, imprecise reasoning or, worst of all, an adherence to a mystical ‘woo’.

....There is, however, a significant weakness hiding in the imposing-looking materialist redoubt. It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is.

Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself.

When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’

That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality.

Like almost every student over the past 100 years, I was shocked by quantum mechanics, the physics of the micro-world. In place of a clear vision of little bits of matter that explain all the big things around us, quantum physics gives us a powerful yet seemly paradoxical calculus.

With its emphasis on probability waves, essential uncertainties and experimenters disturbing the reality they seek to measure, quantum mechanics made imagining the stuff of the world as classical bits of matter (or miniature billiard balls) all but impossible.

....Some neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as the non-scientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality.

But this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or rather, what we don’t know.

....if one wants to apply the materialist position to a concept as subtle and profound as consciousness, something more must clearly be asked for. The closer you look, the more it appears that the materialist (or ‘physicalist’) position is not the safe harbor of metaphysical sobriety that many desire.

Indeed, the problem of conscious experience has caused many philosophers, like Thomas Nagel in his book Mind and Cosmos, for instance, to abandon materialism altogether.

Explaining conscious experience, the sensation of red or the taste of sweet, is what philosophers have referred to as the "Hard" problem and it has proven to be intractable on any materialist account.

Indeed, it's a mystery on any account. For an explanation of what philosophers mean by this go here (also here and here). Frank adds this:

....Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overtly project mind into matter.

Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles.

There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of.

Regardless of the direction ‘more’ might take, the unresolved democracy of quantum interpretations means that our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of mind. It seems just as likely that the opposite will be the case.

If, as some versions of quantum physics insist, there really is no material entity until we observe it then it would seem that what everything reduces to is not matter, but an observing mind. If that's the case then some form of idealism would seem to be true.

But if mind is the ultimate reality, where did it come from? It didn't evolve since evolution can only act on material entities like molecules of DNA.

Perhaps our minds are derivatives of a universal mind which has generated everything that we perceive and holds everything in being. That may seem bizarre, but it's certainly no more bizarre than the idea that matter is, at bottom, simply an abstract wave function with no objective existence.

The Miracle of Man

Australian biologist Michael Denton has written a marvelous book titled The Miracle of Man in which he discusses how physics and chemistry display a prior fitness for life that is quite simply breathtaking.

Virtually, every aspect of the earth, from the properties of water and the hydrological cycle to the transparency and chemical composition of the atmosphere to the properties of the periodic table and so much more have to be almost exactly what they are or else advanced forms of life such as ourselves could never have arisen on the earth.

Moreover, if the metallic elements had not had the precise properties they do there would've been no metallurgy and thus no advanced civilization.

But to have metallurgy there must also be fire and to have fire there has to be a fuel such as wood which means there had to be photosynthesis which means there had to be a transparent atmosphere and water of a certain viscosity.

Surprisingly, perhaps, human beings also have to be about the size they are in order to manage fire.

Denton explains why all this is so and very much more in some 210 fascinating pages.

Here's a trailer that introduces just a few of the themes of the book:

If you're a science student or interested in medicine or just curious about the world in which you live, The Miracle of Man really is a book you must read.

Eighteen Facts

One form of argument employed by investigators - whether police, scientists or philosophers - is called abduction or inference to the best explanation. When confronted by certain facts or evidence, the investigator asks which explanation, among the possible options, fits or explains these facts best with the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

That explanation is then considered the most probable, or best, of the alternatives, and it becomes a working hypothesis until further evidence arises which makes it less tenable.

Below are eighteen facts about the world, some of which are scientific and others of which might be called existential. There are basically two competing metaphysical explanations for these facts in Western culture - naturalism and theism.

Naturalism asserts that the universe and everything about it is the product of purely unguided, random processes. Theism asserts that the universe and everything about it is the product of an intelligent, intentional mind or agent.

We must approach the evidence objectively, that is with no a priori assumptions about the truth or falsity of either explanation, and then ask which of the two explanations do these eighteen facts mesh with most comfortably.

Do they conform best with the view that everything is a product of blind forces and serendipity, or are they best explained by assuming the existence of a transcendent, intelligent agent?

Remember, no a priori assumptions about which of the two alternatives is correct are permitted.

Here are the eighteen with a brief elaboration on each:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning: What caused the universe to come into being when it did? Could it have "just happened"?
2. The fact of cosmic fine-tuning: Is it just a lucky accident that there are dozens of forces, constants and other parameters that are calibrated to within astonishingly precise limits such that were it otherwise either life or the universe itself could not exist?
3. The fact of the ubiquity of biological information: It's the uniform experience of human beings that information is the product of a mind. How, then, did the information in DNA and other macromolecules arise?
4. The fact of human consciousness: How does brain matter by itself generate meaning, sensation and awareness?
5. The fact that mathematics can explain much of the world and that we can comprehend math:
Is it just a coincidence that the world is explicable in the language of math? How did we evolve the ability to do higher math when such an ability had no survival value?
6. The joy we experience when we encounter beauty: Why does beauty, whether visual or auditory, affect us?
7. The fact that we believe human reason to be generally reliable: If reason evolved to aid in survival then it doesn't necessarily produce true beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs, so why should we trust it?
8. Our sense that we have free will: If we're just a collocation of atoms governed by the principles of chemistry where does the powerful intuition that we're in some sense free to choose and responsible for our choices come from?
9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions: Why would the evolutionary process produce in us a desire for answers which are completely unnecessary for survival?
10. Our sense of moral obligation: Where does our sense that we have a duty to do some things and to avoid others come from? Why do we think this sense of duty is somehow binding upon us?
11. Our sense of guilt/regret: If nothing is really right or wrong why do we have a sense of guilt when we engage in certain behaviors? Why do we feel guilt if we're not guilty and what does it even mean to be guilty?
12. Our belief in human dignity: If we're just an animal, an ephemeral product of chance and physical law, from whence comes the notion that we have dignity?
13. Our belief in human worth: Where does the notion that we have worth come from? Evolution?
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights: Who or what decides what these rights are and confers them upon us?
15. Our desire for justice: Why have we evolved a desire for justice if there is no such thing, at least not in an ultimate sense?
16. Our need for meaning and purpose: Why, if we're the product of natural selection and genetic mutation, do we yearn for a deeper meaning to life beyond mere reproduction?
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self: If all we are is a "pack of neurons" (Francis Crick) what is it about us that makes us think we're something more, something that perdures through time?
18. Our desire to survive our own death: If death is just a natural part of life why do we have a desire for something more?

So, which worldview, in your opinion, is the best explanation of these eighteen facts?

The Happy Nihilist

As I've often explained to my students, it's my opinion that metaphysical naturalism entails nihilism. Naturalism is the view that the physical, material world of atoms and molecules is all there is. There are no supernatural entities like God.

It's the view, in the words of Carl Sagan, that "The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be."

Nihilism is the view that nothing in life matters, there's no meaning nor value, especially moral value, to be found because there's no basis for these if naturalism is true.

A student linked me to a short, six minute video in which the producer takes note of viewer complaints that the nihilism of his previous videos was too existentially depressing. He therefore seeks in the present video to offer a more optimistic, upbeat version of nihilism.

It's not clear that he succeeds, or that he even could succeed. Philosophers have, after all, been trying unsuccessfully ever since ancient times to reconcile meaning and moral value with a Godless universe. The only one who came close to succeeding, perhaps, was Aristotle, but the task proved too great even for a man of his genius.

Anyway, the first three minutes or so are given to an elaboration upon the reasons for thinking, on naturalism, that life is meaningless.

The narrator then gives the viewer a "pep talk" on how we should respond to our bleak existential condition. In short, the message is that there's no real point to anything we do in this godless universe, but we should try to make the best of it nevertheless:

The points made throughout the video, once one gets beyond the happy talk and thinks seriously about them, are melancholy. Here's a recap:

Nothing we do matters, the narrator asserts, but that means that all of our mistakes, blunders and bad acts don't matter (3:50).

If this is true, what follows is that there's no reason not to yield to temptations to do bad things. None of those bad acts, acts which harm others, for example, really matters and there's no eternal accountability for how we live so why should we not do what we desire to do?

The video claims (4:05) that our individual life is all that matters, but, if so, what's being offered to us is a justification for egoism, the view that I should always put my own interests ahead of the interests of others. On egoism what's right is what gives me happiness, satisfaction and pleasure and what's wrong is whatever diminishes my happiness, satisfaction and pleasure.

Every tyrant was an egoist, every act of barbarism and evil was done by people who were putting their own interests first. If our life is all that matters then might makes right and whatever someone has the power to do would not be objectively wrong to do no matter how much it harmed others.

This egoism is evident in the narrator's rather preposterous claim (4:15) that we dictate the purpose of the universe.

The narrator goes on to insist that life doesn't matter, but that we can insert meaning into it by having good feelings, and experiencing nice things like music, friends, and video games (4:30).

We should take consolation from the fact that we are part of the universe, the thinking part, but how this can be consoling is hard to see.

It's a bit like encouraging the parent of a dying child to take comfort in knowing that soon as the child's body disintegrates his or her atoms will be recycled into the earth and perhaps eventually be taken up into some other living thing.

In sum, the message is, do good things, have fun, be happy and try to make others happy (4:55). Do whatever makes you feel good, and you get to decide whatever this is (5:45).

Of course, if this is so, then no one can say that the person who feels good by raping, torturing, stealing, and lying is doing anything wrong. After all, we get to decide what makes us feel good and none of our deeds matter anyway.

Such is the world that the "optimistic nihilist" would have us inhabit, but, in fairness to him, he set for himself a hopeless task, and he did the best with it that he could, I suppose.

Whataboutism

Attorney General Merrick Garland has thrown the country into a tizzy by executing an FBI raid on the home of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Perhaps the Justice Department had good reasons for this historic humiliation of a former president, I don't know, but it has certainly raised some serious questions about whether how one is treated by federal law enforcement depends upon one's political party.

In a piece for the Wall Street Journal (subscription) Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, no Trumpster he, discusses the disparity between the DOJ's handling of apparently similar cases in the past. He writes:

Why was the matter handled so differently from the prior investigations of Sandy Berger and Hillary Clinton, who were also suspected of mishandling classified material? Mrs. Clinton herself mocked that question by sporting a baseball cap with the logo “But her emails.”

Her hat is intended to deride the argument made by Trump supporters and some civil libertarians that the investigation of Mr. Trump’s alleged security breaches should be evaluated against the way in which earlier cases were handled.

Berger and Mrs. Clinton were suspected of mishandling confidential materials—he by removing them from the National Archives in 2005, she by transmitting them over her private email server while serving as secretary of state.

Berger was administratively fined, and Mrs. Clinton was rebuked by James Comey, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which might have cost her the 2016 election. But neither was subjected to broad search warrants or criminal prosecution.

For some reason, mention of the case of Ms. Clinton is evidently prohibited in many media precincts which further stokes suspicions that the left cares not one tittle about fairness and equity but only about destroying Trump no matter what the cost. Dershowitz is dismayed by the apparently abandonment of liberal principle:

Those who reject this comparison accuse those who make it of “whataboutism.” But treating like cases alike is crucial to the equal protection of the laws. The way in which Berger and Mrs. Clinton were treated is highly relevant in determining whether Mr. Trump is being subjected to a double standard of justice.

The facts, especially the degrees of culpability, may be different; and if so, that would provide a good answer to the “what about” question. But if the facts are similar and the treatment is different, Americans are entitled to ask whether this constitutes the even application of the law that Mr. Garland promised.

The shoe must fit comfortably on the other foot if justice is to be done and seen to be done. There can’t be one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans.

So the question “What about her emails?” is an appropriate one. Mocking it is no answer. Neither is the cliché “two wrongs do not make a right.”

A second wrong doesn’t justify or excuse the first, but unequal treatment of two comparable wrongs should raise concerns about fairness and equality. Unequal treatment of two equal wrongs is a third wrong.

Not only does the treatment of Mr. Trump seem to violate the Berger/Clinton standard so, too, does the treatment of his associates:

The “whataboutism” argument applies as well to the manner in which Trump loyalists such as Peter Navarro, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort were arrested. In comparable cases involving similar charges, the defendants weren’t handcuffed, shackled or subjected to restraints generally reserved for those who pose a risk of violence or flight.

If our Justice Department allows itself to become a tool of one political party then the United States is no different than Russia, China, North Korea or any third world autocracy.

It may be that the conduct of Mr. Garland's Justice Department is merited by the facts, but until those facts are clearly laid out for the American people to decide, Mr. Garland and his FBI Director Christopher Wray have self-administered another black eye to the agencies they run.

Important Fusion Breakthrough

One of the goals of those researching cleaner energy is to produce heat the way the sun does it, through nuclear fusion. Unlike nuclear fission which produces a lot of radioactive waste products, fusion is clean. The waste product is helium.

It also uses hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium as fuel which can be readily obtained.

The nuclei of these isotopes are positively charged and thus repel each other, but on the sun they're forced together under incredible pressure and temperature to form helium. In this process, called fusion, an immense amount of energy is produced, enough to provide all the heat and light that have bathed our planet for its entire existence.

If this reaction could be harnessed on earth it would go a long way to solving our future energy problems. The difficulty has been generating the conditions necessary to force those nuclei together so that they fuse.

Now it seems that a major hurdle has been overcome by the Lawrence Livermore lab. Newsweek hasthe report:

A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion has been confirmed a year after it was achieved at a laboratory in California.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) National Ignition Facility (NIF) recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021, the results of which have now been published in three peer-reviewed papers.

Once the hydrogen plasma "ignites", the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, with the fusions themselves producing enough power to maintain the temperature without external heating.

Ignition during a fusion reaction essentially means that the reaction itself produced enough energy to be self-sustaining, which would be necessary in the use of fusion to generate electricity.

If we could harness this reaction to generate electricity, it would be one of the most efficient and least polluting sources of energy possible.

No fossil fuels would be required as the only fuel would be hydrogen, and the only by-product would be helium, which we use in industry and are actually in short supply of.

The problem with fusion energy at the moment is that we do not have the technical capabilities to harness this power. Scientists from across the world are currently working to solve these issues.

Newsweek has more details of this encouraging development. Unfortunately, although ignition is a big step there are still many technological difficulties to be overcome and commercial fusion generation may still be decades away.

Even so, humanity is one step closer to realizing an energy boon.

The FBI Doesn't Deserve Our Respect

In the wake of an historically unprecedented raid on the home of a former president by agents of the FBI - a raid that Geraldo Rivera likens to a librarian sending a SWAT team to retrieve an overdue library book - both the DOJ and the FBI have come in for massive criticism from both conservatives and independents.

FBI Director Christopher Wray took umbrage at the criticism and delivered a disturbing statement defending the FBI on Thursday. In a piece for The Federalist Margot Cleveland launches a devastating critique of the Director and his statement.

Here's what he said:

Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others. Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be deeply concerning to all Americans.

The second sentence is so obvious as to be banal, but the first sentence is actually alarming.

What Wray calls "attacks" are legitimate criticisms of the agency he heads. What erodes respect for the rule of law is not the criticism but the behavior that elicits that criticism.

Nor are these criticisms "violence" or unfounded as Wray claims.

In the past five years the FBI has been guilty of both seeking to undermine and depose a duly elected president through deception and dishonesty and has also been guilty of employing an unjust double standard in the manner in which it investigates political figures.

The facts are indisputable and Cleveland makes them clear:

There is nothing “unfounded” in the condemnation of the FBI for its handling of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and it is because of that widespread misconduct that Americans doubt the legitimacy of the FBI’s decision to search the former president's home.

Crossfire Hurricane revealed that agents at the highest levels in the bureau held an anti-Trump political bias. The inspector general’s report established that the FBI submitted four FISA applications replete with lies and material omissions, allowing agents to obtain a court order to surveil Carter Page in violation of Page’s constitutional rights.

The country also learned that the FBI used a backdoor conduit in Bruce Ohr to continue to accept “intel” from Christopher Steele after terminating him as a “confidential human source.”

The Mueller report revealed that for all the talk about investigating Russian interference in the election, the FBI ignored the obvious question of whether Steele had been fed Russian disinformation to meddle in our affairs.

And the trial of Michael Sussmann revealed how nonchalant the FBI was about being misled.

There is nothing “unfounded” about any of these criticisms, and it is precisely because of their legitimacy — and that they all flowed from a “get-Trump” mentality — that the country now condemns the FBI’s raid on Trump’s home.

These are all legitimate criticisms of the FBI's behavior. Does Wray think they constitute "violence?" If so, what conclusion should Americans draw?

Should we conclude that our freedom of speech does not include the freedom to criticize the FBI? Are we on the verge of becoming another version of the Soviet Union?

Cleveland continues to excoriate Wray's absurd statement by focusing on the FBI's double standard:

Further, even if this time the FBI (and its sources) didn’t lie and the court didn’t rubber stamp the search warrant, the raid still deserves condemnation because of the obvious double standard.

The FBI never raided Hillary Clinton’s home during the FBI’s investigation of the former secretary of state for mishandling classified documents.

Consequently, Clinton had time for her minions to wipe her homebrew server with BleachBit, making it impossible for the FBI to recover some emails.

The FBI also didn’t raid Clinton’s houses to search for the 13 mobile devices it believed she might have used to email her staff. The DOJ instead asked Clinton’s lawyers to provide the Blackberries and other devices to agents.

Clinton’s attorneys later told the FBI “they were unable to locate any of these devices.”

Not only was Ms. Clinton the beneficiary of the FBI's deference to Democrats so, too, is the Biden family:

The double standard appears also to apply to Hunter Biden, unless the FBI somehow succeeded in quietly searching his residences without anyone’s notice.

But even that would contrast with how agents treated Roger Stone, when the media amazingly knew to be handy during the pre-dawn raid and search of the Trump ally’s home. And these are but a few of the many examples of disparate treatment based on political affiliation.

Nor is criticism of the FBI’s broader handling of the Hunter Biden case “unfounded,” as multiple whistleblowers recently made clear when they told Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that FBI headquarters buried verified or verifiable evidence implicating the son of the now-president.

If Wray is upset about the public perception of the FBI as a tool of the Democrat party then maybe he should do a little head-knocking and house cleaning at the agency he runs and reestablish the kind of unbiased, non-partisan reputation they once enjoyed.

Wray wants his agency to be respected but respect has to be earned, and it's a lot easier to lose it than it is to gain it.

No New Ideas

In a piece written for his Dispatch column Jonah Goldberg maintains that there have only been two big, new ideas in the history of Western civilization.

The first idea is of particular interest and importance. It is that human beings have inherent dignity and worth:

Basically, there have only been two really new, really big, and really successful ideas in human, or at least Western, history. The first was born of Judaism and Christianity—the idea that the individual has innate moral value and dignity, regardless of class, caste, or tribe.

This idea was entailed by the Divine assertion in the very beginning of the Bible (Genesis 1:27) -"So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them."

If human beings, alone among all created beings, are created in God's image then they have especial worth and value, both corporately and individually.

Apart from this there's no reason whatsoever to assign any particular value to human beings. Every attempt to do so is completely arbitrary. Thus, the atheist and brilliant cosmologist Stephen Hawking could write that, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

Numerous animal rights activists and others are arguing that human beings are not of any more worth than fish or trees. On atheism, of course, they are correct. Atheism (or naturalism) has no non-arbitrary way to ground human exceptionalism.

Moreover, there's nothing in naturalistic evolution that justifies considering human beings to be equal to each other in the rights they enjoy. Given atheistic evolution those who can impose their will on others are perfectly justified in doing so.

Why would it be wrong?

Nietzsche argued in just this way that morality was an invention of the weak to prevent the strong from doing just that. Morality, in other words, is just a subterfuge to protect the weak from the law of survival of the fittest.

The second idea, Goldberg claims, is based upon this Judeo-Christian notion that individuals have innate dignity and value:

The second, which stands atop the first, is liberal democratic capitalism. This idea subordinates the state by making it a piece of technology that serves the people chiefly by providing a legitimate way of making decisions in a free society.

Plenty of kings and czars cast themselves as servants of their subjects. But the key word there is subjects. Pretty much whenever the principle was tested, the people served the state, personified by a ruler, not the other way around.

The ruler’s interests might get gussied up with all sorts of theological or paternalistic junk, but what won out were the interests of the ruler and the ruling class.

Liberal democratic capitalism, the rule of law, and the sovereignty of individual rights overturned all that. Perhaps not always in practice, but conceptually it was a truly new idea, the only truly new idea in the history of political ideas.

It took over fifteen centuries for these ideas to percolate throughout the various cultures of the West, but once they did they revolutionized how people looked at everything from economics to law to each other.

Tragically, both of these ideas are in danger of falling into desuetude today in a culture that holds their foundation - Judeo-Christian religion - in contempt. To the extent that that foundation is dismantled we will find ourselves living in a culture similar to that of ancient Rome with all its brutality, treachery, inequality and horrors.

Why Our Universe Cannot be Infinitely Old

One thorny problem for any naturalist metaphysics is that the consensus among scientists is that the universe came into being at some point in the past.

If that's true then, for reasons discussed in a recent post, it's strong evidence for the existence of a creative, intelligent, transcendent, eternal, and personal first cause, i.e. either God or something very much like God.

If such a cause exists, of course, then naturalism is false, so naturalists, understandably chary about accepting the conclusion that their metaphysics is false, sometimes take refuge in the argument that the universe is infinitely old, past eternal, or beginning-less.

The post linked to above offered scientific reasons for rejecting this argument, but there are philosophical reasons as well. One of these is that an actually infinite set of any physical entities, whether they be moments, or atoms, or whatever, is probably impossible.

Philosopher William Lane Craig explains in the following short video some of the paradoxes that arise in an infinite series of entities and why such a series is highly implausible:

Moreover, even if the universe were in fact infinitely old it still could never have arrived at the present moment.

Kirk Durston in an article at Evolution News and Views explains why:

The evidence from science points to a beginning for the universe. Some atheists, understanding the possible theological implications of a beginning, prefer to set aside science and assert that the past is infinite either in terms of the number of years this universe has existed, or in terms of a fantasized infinite series of universes in a multiverse....

In the real world, an infinite past means that if you were to set the current year as t = 0 and count back into the past, there would never be an end to your counting, for there is no year in the past that was the "beginning."

No matter how long you counted, you would still have an infinite number of years ahead of you to count and, if you were to look back at the set of years you have already counted, it would always be finite.

In other words, if the universe is infinitely old then, if you began counting back from the present moment, you could never count back to a starting point. No matter if you counted forever you would never reach a first moment of the universe.

It follows, then, that neither could you count forward from infinity past to the present moment. If the universe extends infinitely into the past and contains an infinity of past moments then no matter how many of those moments tick by the present moment would never arrive.

Put differently, in order for a series of moments to arrive at the present there has to be a starting point, but if the past is eternal then the necessary starting point keeps receding further and further into the past and in fact does not exist at all.

If there's no initial moment then there's no second moment, and if no second then no third, and so on, and if all this is so, then there'd be no present moment either. But obviously there is a present moment, so it would seem that the assumption of a past eternal universe is false.

Durston goes into more detail than this, but the implication is clear. If the universe is not past eternal then it had a beginning. And if it had a beginning it had a cause.

And any cause of the universe must have the properties listed above, all of which is to say that a finite universe is strong evidence that theism is true.

The Coming War with China

Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, authors of the forthcoming book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, have written a very informative piece (free access, I think) on that topic for the Wall Street Journal.

Anyone interested in potential war with China over Taiwan should read it.

The authors open with this:

The U.S. is running out of time to prevent a cataclysmic war in the Western Pacific. While the world has been focused on Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Xi Jinping appears to be preparing for an even more consequential onslaught against Taiwan.

Mr. Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness: Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity.

This peaking-power syndrome—the tendency for rising states to become more aggressive as they become more fearful of impending decline—has caused some of the bloodiest wars in history. Unless the U.S. and its allies act quickly, it could trigger a conflict that would make the war in Ukraine look minor by comparison.

China has been preparing for this war for a long time:

For the past decade, China’s factories have churned out ammunition and put warships to sea faster than any country since World War II.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) regularly practices missile strikes on mock-ups of Taiwanese ports and U.S. aircraft carriers, and PLA vessels and aircraft menace Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace several times a week.

There is a crucial consideration that makes war likely sometime in the next few years:

Senior U.S. officials warn that China might attack Taiwan in the next half-decade, possibly even in the next 18 months.

Beijing’s belligerence might look like the mark of an ascendant superpower. But the reality is more complex. China isn’t so much a rising state as a peaking power, one that has acquired fearsome coercive capabilities—and soaring power ambitions—but now faces worsening challenges at home and abroad.

...China’s future doesn’t seem so bright. Once-torrid growth had already slowed dramatically before Covid-19 compelled the government to lock down major cities indefinitely.

Water, farmland and energy resources are becoming scarce. Thanks to the legacy of its one-child policy, China is approaching demographic catastrophe: It will lose 70 million working-age individuals over the next decade while gaining 120 million senior citizens.

And whereas the outside world once aided China’s rise, now advanced democracies are kicking Chinese firms out of their financial markets, strangling China’s tech giant Huawei, boosting military spending and creating multilateral coalitions to check Beijing’s expansion.

Mr. Xi may tout the rise of the East and the decline of the West, but behind the scenes, Chinese government reports paint pessimistic pictures of slowing growth at home and surging anti-Chinese sentiment abroad.

In the long term, China’s woes will make it less competitive. It probably can’t outpace America in a superpower marathon, let alone America plus its allies. But in the near-term, we should expect a more dangerous China—one that gambles big to reshape the balance of power before its window closes.

Thus, the longer China waits the less likely their chances of being able to mount a successful war that won't push their own economy past the breaking point.

There are additional considerations, moreover, that make war likely within the next few years:

Mr. Xi’s reforms of the PLA—meant, among other things, to make it capable of taking Taiwan—are nearly complete.

China is rapidly deploying missiles, aircraft, warships and rocket launchers that can pummel Taiwan; it is assiduously rehearsing large-scale amphibious assaults.

Meanwhile, U.S. military power is about to dip. The mid-2020s will witness the mass retirement of aging U.S. cruisers, guided-missile submarines and long-range bombers, leaving the U.S. military with hundreds fewer missile launchers—the key metric of modern naval firepower—floating and flying around East Asia.

While Washington, Tokyo and Taipei are all undertaking much-needed defense programs focused on denying Chinese hegemony in Asia, those efforts won’t bear fruit until the early 2030s.

Mr. Xi has repeatedly said that the task of “liberating” Taiwan cannot be passed down from generation to generation. In the mid- and late 2020s, he’ll have his best chance to accomplish that mission.

Might Beijing try to woo Taiwan back into the fold by intimidation and seduction? Probably not, say Brands and Beckley:

If war comes, it is likely to feature the massive application of force.

Beijing could theoretically try to coerce Taiwan into unification with a more limited operation, such as an air-sea blockade or the seizure of Taiwan’s small offshore islands.

Yet none of these options can guarantee Taiwanese capitulation, and all of them would give Taipei, Washington and other democracies time to mount a punishing response.

To achieve its goals, China has to go big and brutal from the start.

The authors go on to describe what going "big and brutal" would entail and what the U.S. and Taiwan should be doing now to prevent it. And, if they can't prevent it, how they should respond to it.

Like I said above it's a very informative article, and I highly recommend it to anyone concerned about what's in store for all of us over the next couple of years.

A Secular Case for Life?

At The Dispatch David French responds to the argument made by many Pro-Choicers that those opposed to abortion are invariably animated by religious motives.

Thus, the argument goes, to oppose a law that guarantees a right to abortion would be a government imposition of religion:

Ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, I’ve seen a number of people argue that Dobbs is essentially “theocratic,” that it’s the result of a Christian majority of judges imposing their religious beliefs on a religiously-diverse country.

To these critics, arguments against abortion are inherently and inescapably religious—which makes laws curtailing abortion a form of state establishment of religion that violates the religious liberty of dissenting Americans.

An example of this point of view is presented by Matthew Yglesias in a tweet last week in which he wrote:

Abortion policy is the most fun issue to debate on Twitter because one side is motivated by religious considerations and yet the people who hold that view have all been trained to deny that’s the case as if at any minute they might be pressed into arguing a Supreme Court case.

Yglesias believes there are no compelling secular reasons for opposing a right to abortion. French disagrees. He argues that there's a secular case to be made for being pro-life.

I, however, happen to agree with Yglesias on this one, but before I explain why let me summarize French's argument. He writes:

An unborn child has its own separate DNA. It isn’t a tumor or other form of growth that is an extension of the mother. It’s utterly dependent on its mom to live, no question, but it is a separate human life.

Moreover, it is not an inherently religious decision to grant worth to that life—any more than it’s inherently religious to grant worth to any life.

...A friend once explained it to me in these memorable terms. It was because he believed that life was the secular version of a miracle, he said, "The idea that evolutionary processes could lead to the creation of a person who could think, feel, and love was one of the most remarkably improbable things that he could imagine. The natural world was a wonder for him, and the natural world included you and me."

French quotes a left-wing thinker named Mary Meehan:

It is out of character for the left to neglect the weak and helpless. The traditional mark of the left has been its protection of the underdog, the weak and the poor.

The unborn child is the most helpless form of humanity, even more in need of protection than the poor tenant farmer or the mental patient. The basic instinct of the left is to aid those who cannot aid themselves. And that instinct is absolutely sound.

It's what keeps the human proposition going.

This is not an inherently religious argument...It is a moral argument, and moral arguments are not the exclusive prerogative of people of faith.

All that French says here is true, but it misses the point.

It's a biological fact that an individual human life begins at conception, but we can't derive a moral principle from a biological fact.

We cannot base the answer to the question why it's wrong to destroy that life on the biological fact that it's a human being. There must be a higher principle that tells us that human life is sacred, but for an atheist what could that higher principle be?

Don't misunderstand. An atheist may accept that human life is sacred and believe that it's wrong to kill a fetus, but the decision to accept that principle is arbitrary. There's nothing in her atheism that requires that one accept it.

The arbitrariness of this decision is evident in a quote French gives us from a former colleague at National Review who is both an atheist and pro-life:

Over the years, I have had all manner of intricate explanations thrown in my face as to why I, a nonbeliever, might be so invested in saving the lives of human beings who, if left to their own devices, will get to experience all the beauty, heartbreak, and mystery of life.

But, all told, the answer is simple: I am one.

An atheist might ask Cooke why being human means that it would be morally wrong to take the life of another human? What's the higher principle that forbids the taking of human life and where does that principle come from?

Here's my point: I am pro-life because biology tells me that a human life commences at conception (If you doubt this ask yourself this question: When did you come into being?), but I believe it is wrong to take that life, in lieu of very compelling reasons, because I believe that God forbids the gratuitous taking of innocent life.

If I were an atheist I'd have no reason to think that the gratuitous taking of innocent life is morally wrong, or that anything is morally wrong, or right. Indeed, were I an atheist I'd have a very difficult time explaining what is even meant by the term "morally wrong."

So, atheists can and do oppose abortion, a fact for which we can be grateful, but their decision to do so, just like the decision of an atheist to be pro-choice, is purely subjective. It's based on nothing more than their feelings.

The arguments against abortion, like any moral arguments, are at bottom religious because the principles involved - primarily the sacredness of innocent life - are grounded in Divine sanction. They cannot be founded on anything else. No moral claim can be.

Read the rest of French's essay. Even though I think he misses the mark with his main point, his overall column, like most of his work, is interesting.

Mr. Biden's Economy

The Biden administration is trying hard to convince us that we're not in a recession because we're at very low unemployment rates. Things aren't so bad, they tell us, and they're getting better and better due to President Biden's masterful navigation of the economic ship of state.

Well, maybe, but Carrie Sheffield at the Daily Caller has a different take.

She encourages us to consider the whole picture and notes that even though the number of U.S. jobs jumped 528,000 last month, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.5% from 3.6%, matching a five-decade low, that doesn't tell the whole story.

She writes that these figures mask the drop in July of the labor force participation rate to 62.1% in July from 62.2% in June, but this is still far below the 63.4% labor force participation in February 2020.

This translates, she notes, to millions fewer people who would otherwise be working today compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic.

She also notes that jobless claims rose to 260,000 for the week of July 30, almost 6,000 more than the 254,000 recorded the week prior, according to the Labor Department.

Moreover,

Consumer sentiment is at record lows as credit card debt is skyrocketing at a rate not seen in 20 years as people go into the red to pay for inflation.

Credit card balances grew by $46 billion in the second quarter of 2022, the New York Federal Reserve reported, a 5.5% spike from the first quarter.

There was also a 13.1% spike in new credit card accounts. “Americans are borrowing more, but a big part of the increased borrowing is attributable to higher prices,” the New York Fed said in a news release.

Meanwhile, gas prices have dropped some, though they’re still painfully high compared to when Biden took office.

Inflation is at 9.1%, higher than it's been since 1981, and no agency that has studied the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act believes it will actually reduce inflation and most think it will increase it.

In the end, the people who suffer the most from inflation are the poor and the 67% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

It's a tragically ironic state of affairs foisted on the poor by the party that has historically claimed to be their champion.

The Revolution in Philosophy

For some years now there has been a quiet revolution occurring in university philosophy departments throughout the West. Whereas for the better part of the 20th century to be a university philosophy professor was to perforce be a philosophical materialist or naturalist, today a significant minority of philosophers are Christians and the number is growing.

Philosopher William Lane Craig discusses this phenomenon in an article posted on his website. He writes:

“The contemporary Western intellectual world,” declares the noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga, “is a battleground or arena in which rages a battle for men’s souls.” Three schools of thought struggle against each other in the competition to win the minds of thinking men and women: Enlightenment naturalism, post-modern anti-realism, and theism, typically Christian theism.

It is in the field of philosophy that the decisive battles are taking place, and the outcome of these contests will reverberate throughout the university and ultimately Western culture.

Craig then presents a summary of twentieth century philosophy with its heavy emphasis on the positivism of the early century which gave rise to the Verificationism of A. J. Ayer.

In order to understand where we are today, we need first of all to understand something of where we’ve been. In a recent retrospective, the eminent Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf describes what it was like in philosophy at Princeton during the 1950s and ‘60s. The overwhelmingly dominant mode of thinking was scientific naturalism.

Physical science was taken to be the final, and really only, arbiter of truth. Metaphysics—that traditional branch of philosophy which deals with questions about reality which are beyond science—metaphysics had been vanquished, expelled from philosophy like an unclean leper. “The philosophy of science,” says Benacerraf, “was the queen of all the branches” of philosophy, since “it had the tools. . . to address all the problems.”

Any problem that could not be addressed by science was simply dismissed as a pseudo-problem. If a question didn’t have a scientific answer, then it wasn’t a real question—just a pseudo-question masquerading as a real question. Indeed, part of the task of philosophy was to clean up the discipline from the mess that earlier generations had made of it by endlessly struggling with such pseudo-questions.

There was thus a certain self-conscious, crusading zeal with which philosophers carried out their task. The reformers, says, Benacerraf, “trumpeted the militant affirmation of the new faith. . . , in which the fumbling confusions of our forerunners were to be replaced by the emerging science of philosophy.

This new enlightenment would put the old metaphysical views and attitudes to rest and replace them with the new mode of doing philosophy.”

The book Language, Truth, and Logic by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer served as a sort of manifesto for this movement. As Benacerraf puts it, it was “not a great book,” but it was “a wonderful exponent of the spirit of the time.”

The principal weapon employed by Ayer in his campaign against metaphysics was the vaunted Verification Principle of Meaning. According to that Principle, which went through a number of revisions, a sentence in order to be meaningful must be capable in principle of being empirically verified.

Since metaphysical statements were beyond the reach of empirical science, they could not be verified and were therefore dismissed as meaningless combinations of words.

Ayer was very explicit about the theological implications of this Verificationism. Since God is a metaphysical object, Ayer says, the possibility of religious knowledge is “ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics.” Thus, there can be no knowledge of God.

This was the ruling philosophical paradigm in many universities throughout much of the latter part of the 20th century. Consequently, most philosophers dismissed any metaphysical claims, including the claims of Christianity, as meaningless.

I hope you grasp the significance of this view. On this perspective statements about God do not even have the dignity of being false. They’re just meaningless words or sounds uttered in the air.

If you say to someone, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” you’ve said nothing more meaningful than if you had proclaimed, “T’was brillig; and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”

Today that movement has all but disappeared. What happened? Well, what happened is a remarkable story.

It is indeed and you can read about how it all changed at the link. Suffice to say that Christian philosophers, though still a minority, are having a profound impact in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, ethics and epistemology. They're also influencing the field of philosophy of mind.

In any case, the landscape of academic philosophy looks much different than it did just fifty years ago, so much so that atheistic philosophers are taking notice.

An example of this notice is a piece that atheist philosopher Quentin Smith wrote some twenty years ago which Craig quotes in his article.

Give it a read.