Affirmative Action

Conservatives who oppose affirmative action as a general principle are often portrayed by their opponents as bigoted and racist. President Bush was even called an extremist because he harbors doubts about the utility and justice of affirmative action. Yet the evidence keeps piling up that the President's reservations are well-founded. Joanne Jacobs has this report on a recent study:

For blacks graduating from middle-rank law schools, racial preferences are costly, writes Rick Sander, a UCLA law professor and visiting Volokh blogger who's relying on national data on young lawyers' education, jobs and pay. Black students enter law school with lower grades and test scores, Sanders writes in part one of his opus. Part two finds that black law students earn lower grades have a higher drop-out rate and are much more likely to fail the bar exam:

"At American law schools that use large racial preferences, half of all black students end up in the bottom tenth of their first-year class. Put a little differently, the median black student performs in the first-year at about the 7th percentile of the median white student."

Black law graduates who've earned poor grades have poor career prospects, part three concludes:

"Law school prestige is important, but for law graduates as a whole, good grades are a much more powerful predictor of getting a higher-paying job than the eliteness of one's school."

"What this implies about racial preferences is not completely obvious. One needs to estimate both how much of an "eliteness" boost the typical black applicant gets in the admissions process, and how much the average black student's law school GPA would go up if admissions were race-blind and the student went to a lower-ranked school. Both calculations are difficult, and subject to some debate. That said, I think the general pattern is fairly clear. Anywhere outside the most elite schools, new black lawyers are hurt by preferences more than they are helped. For a typical black graduating from a middle-ranked law school, the grades/prestige tradeoff that goes with affirmative action lowers her earnings by about twenty percent."

At top 10 law schools, the gains from prestige offset the grade disadvantage. Black lawyers are more likely to take government jobs and to work in small firms. Some of this undoubtedly is due to preference, writes Sander, but lower grades also are a factor.

African-American writers like Shelby Steele and Stephen Carter have been saying for years that black students are hurt by affirmative action more than they're helped by it. Conservatives have been saying for years that race-based preferences are inherently unjust quite apart from any deleterious impact on the supposed beneficiaries. For our part we just wonder how many generations must come and go before we can assess the success or failure of this experiment. Will there ever be a time when we can say that the unequal playing field established by slavery and Jim Crow has now been evened out and we can all now compete against each other on the basis of our ability, or is affirmative action an entitlement to preference in perpetuity?

Whither Democracy?

Viewpoint has frequently visited the topic of the moral sterility which results from the secularization of a society. Wretchard at Belmont Club takes up the same theme quoting Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia:

[T]hink for a moment what it means to say that there can be no other form of democracy than secular democracy. Does democracy need a burgeoning billion-dollar pornography industry to be truly democratic? Does it need an abortion rate in the tens of millions? Does it need high levels of marriage breakdown, with the growing rates of family dysfunction that come with them? Does democracy (as in Holland's case) need legalised euthanasia, extending to children under the age of 12? Does democracy need assisted reproductive technology (such as IVF) and embryonic stem cell research? Does democracy really need these things? What would democracy look like if you took some of these things out of the picture? Would it cease to be democracy? Or would it actually become more democratic?

The alarm with which many treat people in public life who are opposed to these things often implies that they are a danger to democracy. This overreaction is, of course, a bluff, an attempt to silence opposition, almost suggesting that these practices are essential to democracy.... From outside Western culture, of course, come other possibilities. It is still very early in the piece, of course, but the small but growing conversion of native Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may provide in the 21st century the attraction that communism provided in the 20th, both for those who are alienated or embittered on the one hand, and for those who seek order or justice on the other.

Wretchard's comments on the Cardinal's words are worth reading. He says for instance, that:

[The Cardinal] asks a logical question which cannot be evaded. When the Founding Fathers created the framework for procedural democracy it was unnecessary to spell out its ends because those were largely provided by the moral, ethical and religious consensus of the underlying society. When that underlying civilizational consensus has been destroyed or diluted, as is the case in Western Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States, what intrinsic ends does a value-neutral democratic mechanism serve? The answer possibly, is whatever ends it can be put to....

In other words, whatever can be done by those who wield the power, ultimately will be done if it suits their purposes. Might makes right in a religiously eviscerated society. This is the moral default position and a thoroughly secularized democracy will find it almost impossible to avoid it.

We doubt very much whether there can be a sustainable secular democracy over the long term. Democracy requires a relatively strong consensus on the question of ideals, morals, and political practices. As John Adams said, our form of government was created for a moral people and will not survive under any other. Only a commonly held belief in a Divine will can provide an anchor for the moral ideals necessary to hold disparate subcultures together.

When a democracy secularizes it inadvertantly creates self-doubt and national drift. Relativistic assumptions come to prevail. Eventually no one believes in anything very strongly, certainly not the principle that we should do what's best for the country rather than what's best for ourselves. Society becomes self-centered, egoistic, fragmented and disconnected. There's no metaphysical glue to hold competing groups together, everyone looks to his own parochial interests and sees no reason why he should care about the common good. Society becomes weak and effete. The national will to survive erodes. Law must be piled upon law to ensure behavior that was formerly governed by the inner law rooted in the conscience of each citizen, and which received its sanction from God. Government perforce becomes oppressive, and conditions become auspicious for a tyrant.

The process is well along in Europe, but European nations have had the advantage, until recently, of being ethnically and culturally homogenous. Now that's changing and democratic principles will be severely tested as large numbers of Muslim immigrants challenge the traditional assumptions of Europeans who will almost certainly discover that, having pulled the metaphysical chair out from under them, those assumptions fall flat on their backside.

Democracies require a shared ethnicity and culture or shared principles of governance. If a polity doesn't have the former, as in Japan, then it better have the latter, but a secularized society offers no basis for such principles. It can only hope for an arbitrary and transient consensus. As secularization proceeds apace in both Europe and America, and as both become ethnically more variegated, freedom will groan under the burden placed upon it. It's already happening in European countries with large Muslim populations, and the creaking and cracking of democracy's timbers as they strain under the load in Holland, France, and Germany, for example, are now being heard all the way to this side of the Atlantic.

Ramadi On Deck

Looks like Ramadi is the next snake pit on the military's list.

By the way, what does 1200 terrorist corpses rotting in the streets of Fallujah do to al Zarqawi's recruiting efforts? Hard to imagine that there'd be too many guys eager to wind up like those fellows.

Which leads us to a theological question. What sorts of strains does the debacle in Fallujah place on available resources in Paradise? It can't be easy for Allah's quartermaster general to produce 72 virgins with which to reward each of those "martyrs", can it?

Campus Anti-Intellectualism

Joanne Jacobs cites a piece from the Chronicles of Higher Education by Max Bauerlein on the paucity of intellectual discourse among some faculty on American university campuses. The article confirms the widely held suspicion that many university professors aren't really interested in either thinking or truth but simply in promoting their prejudices. Jacobs writes:

Groupthink in college faculties is anti-intellectual, writes Max Bauerlein, an Emory English professor, in Chronicle of Higher Education. Politics is embedded in some disciplines.

"Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."

Many academics don't read conservative texts or talk to conservative thinkers, writes Bauerlein. They think the conservative intelligentsia is represented by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, "not von Hayek, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, or Gertrude Himmelfarb."

"The ordinary evolution of opinion -- expounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in debate, reading books that confirm or refute them -- is lacking, and what should remain arguable settles into surety."

Liberal professors assume all thinking people agree with them. Those who disagree must be stupid; their ideas aren't worthy of consideration. Academics don't realize they've lost "all sense of the range of legitimate opinion," Bauerlein writes.

"The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they've reached an opinion through reasoned debate -- instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others."

"...Panels on issues like Iraq, racism, imperialism, and terrorism that stack the dais provide lots of passion, but little excitement. Syllabi that include the same roster of voices make learning ever more desultory. Add a few rightists, and the debate picks up. Perhaps that is the most persuasive internal case for infusing conservatism into academic discourse and activities. Without genuine dissent in the classroom and the committee room, academic life is simply boring."

Bauerlein doesn't want affirmative action for conservatives on campus, Jacobs tells us. His goal is to prod professors to think about the ways they exclude and ignore dissenting opinions.

Excluding and ignoring dissenting opinions is a symptom of intellectual insecurity. It's the preferred tactic of those who realize, if only subliminally, that their ideas simply can't withstand the challenge of open debate. Leftist ideas can only survive on campus if they are insulated from scrutiny and immunized from criticism. Many of our universitites have long ago ceased to be part of the marketplace of ideas. Today they are ideological monocultures, heavily laced with a wide variety of politically correct herbicides employed to kill off any unapproved idea which might otherwise take root in this intellectually sterile soil.

Cheat Seekers

Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles (Great Name!) has two posts that we recommend to our readers. The first is a tally of approximately 130 instances of attempts by the MSM to skew voter perception of the candidates in the recent election in Senator Kerry's favor. This list should serve as a valuable reference for anyone who writes about media bias for years to come. It's also a damning indictment of the sheer dishonesty that reigns in the organs of the Left in this country. Honesty, as we recall, is one of those values that Bush supporters were looking for in a presidential candidate. No surprise that those who find an emphasis on values in the electorate alarming would hold integrity in such low esteem.

The second is an account coming out of San Francisco State University:

College Republicans at the San Francisco State University were the target of a racist, threatening attack by PLO and al Qaeda sympathizers who want the victorious national political party kicked off the campus, according to California College Republicans.

Despite a physical assault against one GOP student, and death threats, rape threats and even terrorism threats -- one Arab student yelled, "The only way we can defeat you is to kill as many as possible! I'd rather die a suicide bomber's death than to call myself an American!" -- SFSU President Robert Corrigan refused to take any action against the perpetrators, the General Union of Palestinian Students. Nor was the Palestinian group told not interfere with the ability of the College Republicans to exercise their rights of free speech. In fact, during the earlier attack on Monday, the police asked the College Republicans if they would leave rather than arresting their attackers.

Even during the Vietnam war, the GOP was not the target of Leftist violence. The reaction of the Left to the proper functioning of the democratic process is getting more and more troubling. The reaction shows that their hatred goes far beyond President Bush, and is an attack on more than half of the American voting public.

We'd like to add that attacks like this are abetted by pusillanimous university administrators whose failure to act decisively against the thugs only insures that there will be more thuggery. If conservative white students had said anything like what the Arab student is reported to have said they would've been thrown out of school before they had finished the sentence. Unfortunately, the list of courageous university administrators is as short as the list of instances of MSM bias is long.

Foreknowledge and Free-Will

The philosophically and theologically minded might wish to visit Evangelical Outpost where Joe Carter presents William Lane Craig's attempt to reconcile God's foreknowledge with man's free will.

Craig's argument is clever, but a little convoluted. Perhaps there's an easier way to think of the problem.

In a post titled God and Time last July Viewpoint suggested that the problem Craig is addressing arises because we tend to think of God as inhabiting the same time that we inhabit. God, however, is transcendent. He exists outside of the space-time world that He created. Thus everything that happens in our time - our past, present, and future -reside continually in God's present.

We might think of it this way: God is like a vast sphere or ball, and time is a thin line segment drawn in ink across the surface. Every part moment in time, like every point on the line, is in contact with God simultaneously. God is continually conscious of every moment in our time. He stands in the same relation to our past and our future as he does to our present.

It follows that God knows the choices we made yesterday. Yet we don't have to think that because he knows what choices we made yesterday that He therefore caused those choices. Nothing about God's present knowledge forces us to conclude that our past choices were determined by Him any more than our knowledge of past events somehow caused those events. Knowledge after an event doesn't cause or determine the event.

Prior knowledge of future events is different, though. If we knew, genuinely knew, that a particular event would occur tomorrow, then we might be tempted to think that tomorrow's event is inevitable, that it must occur. This, however, is because we are embedded in time. God is not. Our future is in His present just as our past is. His knowledge of the future is similar to his knowledge of the past, and, if the two really are like mirror images of each other, His knowledge of an event or of a choice we will make tomorrow does not cause us to make that choice.

His foreknowledge would be no more determinative than His post-knowledge. Indeed, it would be more correct to say that just as our free choices yesterday caused God to have the knowledge He has about those choices today, so, too, our choices tomorrow cause the knowledge He has about those choices today. Our choices determine His knowledge. His knowledge doesn't determine our choices. Thus God can have foreknowledge of our future and humans nevertheless remain free to create it.

Hitting the Bullseye

No Left Turns posts an excerpt of an article appearing in the next issue of The New Republic. The article is written by Brad Carson, the losing Democratic Senate candidate in Oklahoma, who reflects upon his defeat and the contemporary culture war. Carson writes:

"The culture war is real, and it is a conflict not merely about some particular policy or legislative item, but about modernity itself. Banning gay marriage or abortion would not be sufficient to heal the cultural gulf that exists in this nation. The culture war is about matters more fundamental still: whether nationality is, in a globalized world, a random fact of no more significance than what hospital one was born in or whether it is the source of identity and even political legitimacy; whether one's self is a matter of choice or whether it is predetermined, before birth, by the cultural membership of one's family; whether an individual is just that--a free-floating atom--or whether the individual is part of a long chain that both predates and continues long after any particular person; whether concepts like honor and shame, which seem so quaint, are still relevant in a world that values only "tolerance." These are questions not for politicians but for philosophers, and, in the end, it is the failure of liberal philosophy that we saw on November 2.

"For the vast majority of Oklahomans--and, I would suspect, voters in other red states--these transcendent cultural concerns are more important than universal health care or raising the minimum wage or preserving farm subsidies. Pace Thomas Frank, the voters aren't deluded or uneducated. They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones. The political left has always had a hard time understanding this, preferring to believe that the masses are enthralled by a "false consciousness" or Fox News or whatever today's excuse might be. But the truth is quite simple: Most voters in a state like Oklahoma--and I venture to say most other Southern and Midwestern states--reject the general direction of American culture and celebrate the political party that promises to reform or revise it."

As long as the Democrats continue in their state of denial about the meaning of November 2nd they will be in special need of men with Carson's understanding. Unfortunately, to the extent that they pay people like him no heed and remain fixated on stolen votes, secession, and stereotypes of red state (or more accurately, red county) voters they'll continue their slide into political irrelevance.

Battlefield Tech, Etc.

Readers interested in how American technology is put to use on the battlefield will find these two reports here and here from Bing West at Slate very interesting.

Thanks to Chester for the tip.

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail also has some good commentary on the last couple of days in Fallujah as does The Strategy Page.

Three items especially worth noting are these. First from The Strategy Page:

Very few civilians have been encountered in Fallujah. Those that claim to be civilians are given a "residue test" to see if their hands have fired a gun or handled explosives recently. Very few young men in Fallujah come away clean.

We wondered how our troops were able to distinguish civilians from fighters in the exodus from the city.

And these two from The Fourth Rail:

Violence has flared up in Mosul, and a Stryker battalion is being diverted from Fallujah to the northern city. Four battalions of the Iraqi National Guard, which were patrolling the Syrian and Iranian borders, have also been dispatched to Mosul to restore order. The commander of the local police has been relieved from duty and the chief of the anti-crime unit was assassinated.

The move of the Stryker battalion from Fallujah to Mosul indicates the Coalition is confident in the situation in Fallujah. Fallujah is a high priority and a significant amount of time, planning and resources has been devoted to success. The move, along with the redeployment of the four Iraqi National Guard battalions from the borders, also underscores a lack of resources in Iraq. There does not appear to be a strategic reserve of troops available to conduct an operation the size of Fallujah without pinching units from other areas. This problem will subside as additional Iraq Army and National Guard units come on line, but the current operations being conducted in the Sunni Triangle will expose this weakness.

Perhaps the biggest mistake of the post-war was not having more troops available, and we have been paying for the apparent misjudgment for over a year. We are not military experts and we fear asking a foolish question, but how many combat troops do we still have stationed in Europe, South Korea, and Okinawa, and what purpose are they serving there?

Secondly, another well-known Iraqi militant group, Ansar al-Sunnah Army, claimed in a statement on its Web site Friday to have joined forces with al-Zarqawi's group and the Islamic Army in Iraq.

While the cooperation between the groups will expand their resources and make them more formidable, this will expose the groups to infiltration. Terrorist groups maintain operational security by operating in small groups, or cells, with limited knowledge and contact between cells. The larger a terror network becomes, the greater chance a high-ranking member with detailed knowledge of the organization is captured or flipped. The merger may also be occurring for practical reasons. Large numbers of terrorists are being chewed up in Fallujah, and there may be manpower problems for al Qaeda in Iraq.

Time is not on the terrorists' side in Iraq. As the Iraqi military gets stronger, elections get closer, and terrorist forces continue to be depleted their prospects for success continue to dim. Barring a catastrophic strike against the United States' homeland, the only hope Islamists have in Iraq is for their allies in the American left to wear away at the patience and will of the American people. Doubtless they'll continue to do their best.

Thank You, Mr. Attorney General

Jonah Goldberg tells us why he thinks John Ashcroft's departure is a big loss for America. Despite his despisers and those who gasped at the threat to civil liberties every time the Attorney General sneezed, this nation is deeply indebted to John Ashcroft for his service. Goldberg sums up why in this paragraph:

By conventional standards, Ashcroft was among the best attorney generals in American history. Violent crime dropped 27 percent on his watch, reaching a 30-year low. Federal gun crime prosecutions rose 75 percent, and gun crimes dropped - something that should please liberals. By unconventional standards his service was heroic. There hasn't been a single terrorist attack since 9/11, despite all predictions by experts and efforts by terrorists to the contrary. Ashcroft was willing to take gross abuse to do what was necessary. Indeed, even the 9/11 commission certified that the Patriot Act was absolutely necessary to fix many of the problems that led to that awful day.

Elsewhere in the column Jonah takes on the major criticisms that have been relentlessly levelled at Ashcroft over the last several years and shows them to be utterly without serious merit. He neglects to mention, however, that with all the foaming-at-the-mouth allegations of how Ashcroft was infringing on civil liberties, never once was there an episode during his tenure comparable to the immolation of dozens of women and children in Waco, Texas, or the shootings of other innocent women and children by federal agents in Idaho under Janet Reno. Nor was there anything nearly as shameful as the Elien Gonzalez episode in Florida.

He might have noted, too, that Ashcroft became Attorney General after losing a bid to retain his senate seat. He lost the election because he chose not to campaign after his opponent was killed in an airplane crash. His opponent's wife allowed her name to be placed on the ballot and, in an outpouring of sympathy, she won. Ashcroft's decision not to campaign against her was an act of graciousness that's hard to imagine his detractors duplicating.

Goldberg also declines to mention the real animus behind the vilification of this dedicated public servant. Ashcroft is seen as a threat by, and to, the secular left chiefly because of his strong Christian convictions. The left cannot abide the thought that someone in power would take Christianity seriously. Ashcroft does, and consequently nothing he could have done short of resigning would have mollified the attack dogs in the press and elsewhere.

The left, whether consciously or not, wishes to make it as difficult as possible for a man or woman of faith to serve in the upper reaches of government. They ultimately may be successful in making public service so personally unpleasant that many good people will simply avoid it, but, if so, our government will suffer grievously from the want of most of the virtues without which any government becomes corrupt and ineffective.

Men like John Ashcroft are the salt of the earth, his Justice Department was a breath of fresh air after the Janet Reno interlude, and he will be greatly missed by those who admire rectitude, integrity, and common sense in their leaders.

No Tears For Yasser

Viewpoint sheds no tears over the death of Yasser Arafat. More than any other single figure in the region he bears responsibility for the crisis between the Palestinian and Israeli people. He was a thug, a thief, and a mass murderer with the blood of hundreds of Israelis, dozens of Americans, and countless Palestinians on his hands. The Palestinian people languish in misery and poverty today largely because of this man's personal corruption and psychotic obsession with destroying Israel. Andrew McCarthy composes an excellent overview of his venal and blood-stained life at National Review Online. We decline to mourn.

If Democrats Went To Church

Morton Kondracke writes a lovely essay on what the Democrats need to learn about religion, specifically evangelical Christianity. We commend the entire piece to the reader but would like to highlight a couple of paragraphs which are particularly good and a couple of others which merit comment. Kondracke writes:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, next to Charles Krauthammer the owner of the highest I.Q. on the nation's op-ed pages, wrote last week that "my problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote division and intolerance at home and abroad."

Friedman's vaunted intelligence evidently abandons him when it comes to thinking about religion in the public arena. Why is it okay for Kerry to say that he's motivated by religious principles when it comes to fighting for equality and justice and for the environment, all of which involve imposing his values on other people, but it's not okay for Bush's positions on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, gay marriage, and the importance of freedom around the world to be informed by his religious principles? Why are Bush's positions on these issues divisive, when roughly half the country agrees with him, but Kerry's positions are not divisive even though half the country opposes him? For people like Friedman being divisive means proposing policy that Friedman doesn't like, being intolerant means not tolerating different things than Friedman doesn't tolerate.

Kondracke goes on to say that:

If fair-minded secular Democrats went to church - they are open to the public, by the way - here's some of what they'd learn: Lesson No. 1: Far more than abortion, evolution or homosexuality, Evangelical Christianity is about love, redemption, forgiveness, charity, humility, hope and self-sacrifice.

The best Evangelicals I know truly change lives - they turn around people who are addicted to drugs and pornography. They give the despairing and the guilt-ridden reason to persevere. They restore marriages. They transform criminals in prison.

They try to follow Jesus, who, if they studied him a little, no Democrat could possibly be scared of. I think this is what Bush's faith is all about - not arrogance or mindless certitude, but humility and a sense of duty.

Lesson No. 2: Evangelicals are scared, too. They are scared of the fruits of secularism and the deterioration of the culture in which they're trying to raise their children. Of hip-hop lyrics that encourage rape and murder. Of PG-13 movies and "family hour" sitcoms that tell children that if they're not having sex at 16, they're out of it. Of the scuzzy showbiz people who often surround Democrats.

I'd guess that most Evangelicals are "homophobic." Some are so in the bigoted sense, but many more in the sense that what they know of the "gay lifestyle" scares them. And they also are scared (I think, wrongly) that the already-battered institution of marriage will be demolished if committed gay couples are permitted to share in it.

This is a fine piece of writing and we're reluctant to quibble with it. Everything he says about Christians and Christianity would be plain to anyone who really tried to get past media stereotypes, but we have to disagree with Kondracke on his belief that gay marriage would not jeopardize traditional marriage.

As Viewpoint has noted on previous occasions, once the gender of the spouses is no longer a matter of law there will no longer remain any non-arbitrary basis for legal limits upon the number of wedded spouses. If legislatures no longer establish the gender, there will be no logical ground for establishing the number, and perhaps even biological relatationship, of the betrothed. Once society has set a tentative foot onto this slippery slope it will quickly find itself tobogganing downhill, unable to stop its plunge until marriage has been transformed into a union between any combination of people (and why limit it to people?) who desire to join together in wedlock for whatever purpose and for whatever length of time.

When this comes to pass marriage will cease to exist in any meaningful sense. The left has always seen the abolition of marriage, and thus of the family, as a progressive desideratum. Many Christians disagree, and in the minds of their critics that makes them bigots and homophobes. So be it.

The Democrats' Dilemma

An article on the Democrats' "religion predicament" by Jonah Goldberg is worth calling to our readers' attention. He writes that:

In the final presidential debate, John Kerry, a Catholic, did his level-best to talk about his faith. It is, he explained, "why I fight against poverty. That's why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this Earth. That's why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith."

But, at the same time, Kerry said he could not "transfer" his faith onto other people by legislating it. This struck many as a political and theological dodge. Why is it OK to brag about imposing the minimum wage and affirmative action - issues his faith is largely silent on - based on God's will, but it's wrong to do the same thing on abortion when his church's views there are clear and ironclad? Kerry wanted it both ways: to claim he was guided by faith on the easy stuff but that he couldn't impose his religion when it wasn't politically advantageous.

The larger problem for the Democrats is that liberalism itself, or what we erroneously call liberalism today, is in a crisis. It recognizes that politics must have an underlying morality to it, but it is antagonistic to traditional morality. This is foolish since our greatest political movements - abolitionism, civil rights, etc. - were religious before they were political. Moreover, attempts to construct new, secular, moralities have been failures, even at the seminar level. At the national level (think feminism, Hillary Clinton's "Politics of Meaning," socialism, etc.), they've been non-starters.

Goldberg puts his finger on something very important in the penultimate sentence. Liberal secular Democrats scorn "traditional morality" largely because they disdain the religion through which it comes and ultimately the God upon which it is based. In their rebellion against God they insist that they can create their own morality based upon reason, but such attempts are chronic failures. Reason, by itself, cannot invent an ethics. It can only help us to see where our ethics leads us given a particular starting point. Unfortunately for the Democrats, if we start from a position of secularism or naturalism then, if we follow our reason, we must end up as either subjectivists, egoists, or nihilists, or some combination thereof, and none of these are conducive to a healthy polity.

Subjectivism says that right and wrong are a matter of one's own individual preferences and tastes. We prefer some behaviors for the same reason we prefer some flavors or colors - we just like them. Subjectivists recognize that if right and wrong are matters of taste then no one's morality is any better than anyone else's and we should not pass moral judgment upon others (which is, by the way, a self-contradictory claim since it itself implies a moral judgment on others). We need to be tolerant of others' values, the subjectivist insists, unless, of course, the values in question are abhorrent to the subjectivist, like racism or homophobia, etc.

In discussions about morality subjectivists can be depended upon to utter inanities like "that's just your opinion" or "who's to say what's right or wrong", or "If it's right for him then it's right". Each of these statements assumes that moral disagreements are simply disputes about matters of taste, but this is a pretty shallow assumption when one thinks about it. Most subjectivists, for example, would be reluctant to say of Adolf Hitler that if killing millions of Jews was right for him, then it was right.

A subjectivist outlook leads inexorably to egoism, the conviction that we should put our own interests ahead of the interests of others. If this life is all there is then I might as well make the most of it, and if whatever I feel is right is right, then there's no good reason why I shouldn't seek to maximize my own good regardless of the effect that conduct has on others.

Whatever other ethic men might try to live by, whether the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill or the duty-based ethics of the Kantians, or any other, there is no satisfactory answer to the question why one should adopt that particular system. Why should I seek the greatest good for the greatest number, as the utilitarians propose, rather than seek the greatest good for me? Why should I accept the idea of acting in a way that I could want everyone to act, as the Kantians teach, rather than acting in a way that benefits me regardless of its effects on others? Once we step away from the idea that there is a transcendent moral authority we no longer have any satisfactory answer to the question of why I shouldn't just live for myself.

Some will reply to the previous assertion by saying that I shouldn't live egoistically because people get hurt when we only look out for ourselves, but why should I care if people get hurt as long as I don't? The response to that is often that I wouldn't want people to do things that hurt me, and that's true, of course, but that's not a reason why I shouldn't do something that hurts others if it benefits me, and if I can get away with it.

The third possibility, not really very different from the first two, actually, is to simply acknowledge that in a world without God moral right and wrong don't even exist. People just do what they do and there is no moral dimension to it, anymore than there's a moral dimension to a cat's torturing a mouse. Where, after all, does something like moral obligation come from if not from God? Can nature impose moral obligation? Can evolution impose it? Can society impose it? Reason tells us that in the absence of God moral right and wrong are empty concepts. Man is his own creator of values (subjectivism) as Nietzsche wrote, and there is no wrong in choosing to live for oneself (egoism). This is nihilism and it is where our reason eventually brings us if we start from a position of atheism and follow it all the way to its logical conclusion.

Secular man often makes his starting point the principle that we should not harm others and employs his reason to arrive at the best way to implement that principle in his life. But it's his starting point which is in question. If his first principle is challenged he has no satisfactory answer. He cannot give a compelling explanation of why harming others is wrong. To many people, of course, it just seems self-evident. It's wrong to harm others, they believe, because, well, because anyone can see that harming others is wrong. In fact, the starting point is not self-evident at all. It is an arbitrary assumption, and it is quite indefensible.

This is the liberals' dilemma. They wish to secularize society, to construct a secular value system based upon our shared humanity and the harm principle, but the whole enterprise is an exercise in walking on water. By declaring religious reasons to be illegitimate in the realm of public discourse they have neutered all ethical defenses of any public policy proposals. State secularism gives us no foundation for moral obligation or moral judgment. Every time a secular ethic is tried it collapses, as it has in communist countries around the globe.

The Democrats wish to push Christianity out of the public square and yet hold on to the concept of morality, but that's like trying to remove the foundation from a building without having the building collapse. It can't be done in the moral world any more than it can be done in the physical world, and a lot of people just aren't going to trust the Democrats to run the country as long as they keep trying it.

Cognitive Dissonance

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost calls our attention to this rather bizarre result of a compilation of surveys of atheists done by the Barna Group.

1 out of every 2 atheists and agnostics say that every person has a soul.

1 out of every 2 atheists believes that Heaven and Hell exist.

1 out of every 2 atheists believes that there is life after death.

1 out of every 3 atheists and agnostics talks about faith-related matters during a typical week.

1 out of every 3 atheists prayed to God, in past 7 days.

1 out of every 3 atheists want 'creationism" taught in the public schools.

1 out of every 8 atheists and agnostics believe that accepting Jesus Christ as savior probably makes life after death possible.

1 out of every 10 atheists believes that absolute moral truth exist.

1 out of every 12 atheists read from the Bible, other than while at church, in past 7 days.

1 out of every 25 atheists attended a church service, other than a special event such as a wedding or funeral, in past 7 days.

Yikes! And atheists criticize and scoff at Christians for not practicing what they profess to believe!

Buy Generic

Andrew Sullivan directs our attention to an article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker on prescription drug costs. The essay, which is ostensibly a book review, actually does an excellent job of explaining how prices get set and what factors influence them.

Most people tend to believe that pharmaceutical companies bear the entire responsibility for high prices, but, in fact, according to Gladwell there are plenty of guilty parties. Not just manufacturers but the FDA, insurance companies, doctors, and even consumers all share much of the responsibility for driving prices up.

Nexium provides us with an example of how the pharmaceutical manufacturers manage to boost the price and increase their profits. The story is fascinating so we'll copy a portion of it here:

Ten years ago, the multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca launched what was known inside the company as the Shark Fin Project. The team for the project was composed of lawyers, marketers, and scientists, and its focus was a prescription drug known as Prilosec, a heartburn medication that, in one five-year stretch of its extraordinary history, earned AstraZeneca twenty-six billion dollars. The patent on the drug was due to expire in April of 2001. The name Shark Fin was a reference to what Prilosec sales-and AstraZeneca's profits-would look like if nothing was done to fend off the ensuing low-priced generic competition.

The Shark Fin team drew up a list of fifty options. One idea was to devise a Prilosec 2.0-a version that worked faster or longer, or was more effective. Another idea was to combine it with a different heartburn remedy, or to change the formulation, so that it came in a liquid gel or in an extended-release form. In the end, AstraZeneca decided on a subtle piece of chemical re�ngineering. Prilosec, like many drugs, is composed of two "isomers"-a left-hand and a right-hand version of the molecule. In some cases, removing one of the isomers can reduce side effects or make a drug work a little bit better, and in all cases the Patent Office recognizes something with one isomer as a separate invention from something with two. So AstraZeneca cut Prilosec in half.

AstraZeneca then had to prove that the single-isomer version of the drug was better than regular Prilosec. It chose as its target something called erosive esophagitis, a condition in which stomach acid begins to bubble up and harm the lining of the esophagus. In one study, half the patients took Prilosec, and half took Son of Prilosec. After one month, the two drugs were dead even. But after two months, to the delight of the Shark Fin team, the single-isomer version edged ahead-with a ninety-per-cent healing rate versus Prilosec's eighty-seven per cent. The new drug was called Nexium. A patent was filed, the F.D.A. gave its blessing, and, in March of 2001, Nexium hit the pharmacy shelves priced at a hundred and twenty dollars for a month's worth of pills. To keep cheaper generics at bay, and persuade patients and doctors to think of Nexium as state of the art, AstraZeneca spent half a billion dollars in marketing and advertising in the year following the launch. It is now one of the half-dozen top-selling drugs in America.

In the political uproar over prescription-drug costs, Nexium has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. The big drug companies justify the high prices they charge-and the extraordinary profits they enjoy-by arguing that the search for innovative, life-saving medicines is risky and expensive. But Nexium is little more than a repackaged version of an old medicine. And the hundred and twenty dollars a month that AstraZeneca charges isn't to recoup the costs of risky research and development; the costs were for a series of clinical trials that told us nothing we needed to know, and a half-billion-dollar marketing campaign selling the solution to a problem we'd already solved. "The Prilosec pattern, repeated across the pharmaceutical industry, goes a long way to explain why the nation's prescription drug bill is rising an estimated 17 % a year even as general inflation is quiescent," the Wall Street Journal concluded, in a front-page article that first revealed the Shark Fin Project.

Gladwell goes on to explain how consumers almost always have cheaper options but often doctors don't inform them of those choices. The over-the-counter Prilosec is almost identical to prescription Nexium and virtually as effective, and it only costs twenty dollars a month, one sixth the cost of Nexium.

There is much else of interest in this article. Gladwell points out, for instance, that it is a myth that the U.S. has the highest drug costs in the world. In fact, our overall costs are just about the cheapest if one excludes name brands and calculates costs on the basis of generic equivalents. Moreover, patents on many widely-used name brands are scheduled to soon expire, which will open the market to generics and cause overall costs to drop even more. Good news, indeed.

Good Sources On Iraq War

For the latest on Fallujah check out The Fourth Rail, Belmont Club, and Strategy Page. They each have excellent analyses of the fighting and pull together all the latest news reports from the city.

Fools, Knaves, and Radicals

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times that, "President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is." Carl Bernstein repeated a similar allegation on MSNBC's Scarborough Country on Tuesday night.

The assertion is either absurd or dishonest, or both, and those who make it are either fools or knaves, or both. To see why let's look at what the claim is based upon.

George Bush is said to be a radical because he opposes gay marriage and proposes a constitutional ammendment to prevent it. Bush is accused of trying to impose a religious belief on the rest of the nation, but this is silly. He is not trying to impose anything, rather he's seeking to preserve a two thousand year old institution which is essential to the well-being of our children and of our society. Indeed, it is his opponents who are attempting to impose a radical change upon society by by-passing state legislatures and having judges override the will of the people on this matter through the exercise of judicial fiat.

George Bush is called a radical because he opposes abortion on demand and would probably appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would roll back Roe v. Wade. At least three justices on the Court today believe that Roe is an extra-constitutional overreach on the part of the Supreme Court in 1973 and that it was very poorly decided. Even many liberals, Michael Kinsley comes to mind, who do not want it overturned have said the same thing. Maybe half the country agrees that it should be reversed and the decision as to whether abortions should be legal returned to each state so that the people of that state can decide the issue for themselves. Why is that radical?

President Bush is called a radical because he opposes the use of federal tax dollars to subsidize embryonic stem cell research. His policy is essentially an extension of the state of affairs as it was under Bill Clinton. He believes that the embryo is a living human being and, therefore, if it is going to be sacrificed for scientific research, taxpayers should not be compelled to pay for its destruction any more than they should be compelled to pay for abortions. If private industry or universities wish to carry out this research, Bush has put no barriers in their way. He has only declared that such research will not be funded by tax dollars. How does that make him radical?

President Bush is called a radical because he believes that God grants world leaders wisdom if they seek His will, and he believes that God acts in human history. This belief places him in the company of a long line of great presidents including George Washington and Ronald Reagan. It also puts him in the company of some Democratic presidents like Jimmy Carter. Most of the people in this country, whether they are Christian or not, believe pretty much what George Bush believes. In fact, the convictions George Bush embraces place him in the historical mainstream in this country, so what is radical about that?

A radical is one who seeks to overturn the settled practice and norms of a society. A conservative seeks to preserve them. A radical is a member of a minority who is well out of the mainstream of social and political thought. A conservative may be in the minority, but usually he is not. George Bush either does not wish to overturn settled norms, or, if he does, as in the legal acceptance of abortion on demand, his position is not out of the mainstream. Fifty percent of the country agrees with him. Krugman and Bernstein know this, but it suits their purposes to simply paint the President as an extremist even though they're fully aware that he's not. That's why their claims are both foolish and dishonest.

A Little Bit of Heaven

We hear that some Democrats, Lawrence O'Donnell for instance, are recommending secession of Blue states from the union as a viable response to Bush's election. Presumably, these desperate souls hope to form a country where women will be able to abort their babies willy-nilly, unhindered by the sort of qualms voiced by those dreadful pro-lifers; where gays will be able to marry freely and marriage will mean whatever "enlightened", "reality-based" people want it to mean; where entertainment celebrities will decide how the police and military will be employed, if at all; where no Christians will be admitted to the public square, in order to insure social tranquility; and where 70% tax rates, or higher, will be imposed on the wealthy to insure social equality. Sounds like heaven on earth.

The Moral Apostasy of the Left

Atheist Christopher Hitchens recognizes an important difference between left-wing atheists and the Christian George Bush: The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The President fights them. In an excellent essay for Slate Hitchens delivers an indictment of his erstwhile allies on the ideological left. A couple of salient excerpts:

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda?

Suicide murderers in Palestine-disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO-described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time....

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he-and the U.S. armed forces-have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary-that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL.

Now if Hitchens were only willing to see that the strong sense of moral purpose and judgment which inspire his writing are without any substantial foundation in a universe without God, perhaps he would abandon not only the left but also the left's atheism. After all, a consistent thinker like Mr. Hitchens must recognize, once he reflects upon the matter, that one cannot be both an atheist and a moralist. Ultimately, one or the other must be thrown over.

If there is no God then there is no right or wrong apart from our subjective tastes or preferences. Our personal predilections, however, offer us no ground at all upon which to stand while passing judgment on the behavior of others, and Mr. Hitchens has built his career upon the passing of such judgments.

The Good News Keeps Coming

Arthur Chrenkoff's 14th edition of Good News From Iraq is on-line, and there's a ton of it. One wonders how many Democrats know about this site. Surely they aren't aware of it at ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN else their reportage on Iraq wouldn't be so consistently gloomy and pessimistic.

Speaking of Iraq, and more particularly, Fallujah, Belmont Club is on top of military developments there.

PEST

Captain's Quarters offers some pungent thoughts on the self-absorbed snifflings of Florida Democrats who are seeking therapy for what's being called Post Election Selection Trauma:

Just when I thought it was impossible for Democrats to sink any lower in their post-election tantrums - after all, it's hard to top secession as a political strategy for the arrested-development set - now they have their very own psychological disorder, according to the Boca Raton News:

The Boca Raton News reported Tuesday that Palm Beach, Florida trauma specialist Douglas Schooler alone has already treated 15 clients and friends with intense hypnotherapy since the Democratic candidate conceded on November 3.

"I had one friend tell me he's never been so depressed and angry in his life," Schooler said. "I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated," he told the daily.

"We're calling it 'post-election selection trauma' and we're working to develop a counseling program for it," said Rob Gordon, the Boca Raton-based executive director of the American Health Association.

I have a theory that Democrats are secretly thrilled to have lost this election to George Bush, and this report confirms it. Nothing makes a Leftist happier than to belong to a victim class, and now they have created one that may exceed any that came before. It makes them feel more complete than even an official apology would. Next up, of course, is forcing employers and health-care providers to recognize it as a disability under ADA.

I would have thought that such a report could only be published by the Onion, but unfortunately this may be the least irrational reaction by Democrats this week. We've had MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell call for secession, his colleague Keith Olbermann proclaim the election rigged (while providing no evidence whatsoever), and massive requests for immigration information from Kerry supporters to everywhere except, oddly enough, France.

So far, the Democrats are demonstrating that they are anything but; in order to support democracy, one has to accept when their candidate loses as well as when they win. I'd like to ask how it feels to be less committed to democracy than the Afghanis, whose opposition candidates readily accepted their election results despite numerous hardships and difficulties. It's embarrassing when mainstream voices in a major party call for the breakup of the United States, and it's an insult to the men who gave their lives to keep the Union together less than 150 years ago, especially since the stakes are so superficial and petty.

At least they gave the "illness" a good name. Post-election selection trauma, or PEST, describes these summer patriots to a T.

The symptoms of the disorder make the sufferers sound like spoiled, self-centered brats who are so used to having their way that they can't believe they didn't get it in the election. One wonders how many of Mr. Schooler's clients beat their legs with their fists and stomped their feet when they realized that George Bush was going to win.