There seems to be a surfeit of hypocrisy among Don Imus' detractors (though none here at Viewpoint, of course). Michelle has the goods on two of the big fish, Al Sharpton and Barack Obama.
For readers who may not realize the kind of sleaze rappers like Ludicris put out on the air waves to be soaked up by our kids, Michelle also offers some lyrics at the Obama article. For strong stomachs only.
RLC
The tragedy at Virginia Tech conjures up a flood of thoughts. Two questions in particular are on everyone's mind: Why do these things happen? What can be done to stop them?
Like a lot of people, I think that the answer to the first question is two-fold. First, too many young people are in the grip of a murderous nihilism because as a society we have rejected the only belief system which gives us any basis for valuing human life and for treating others with respect and kindness.
Secondly, our young are immersed in a culture of violence and death in which they hear about killing, talk about killing, laugh about killing, and practice killing in their video games for hours every day.
Those two toxic elements form a time bomb in a person, a binary weapon, which, when the ingredients are mixed, becomes an explosive killer.
By abandanoning the Judeo-Christian worldview that was the mortar which held society together for three centuries, and replacing it with an atheistic materialism that offers no ground at all for morality, no basis for conferring worth on other people, we stripped our young of any basis for thinking of others as valuable in their own right.
In the absence of a God, people are valuable only to the extent that others value them, but atheistic materialism offers no reason why anyone should value another human being. If we're nothing but animals then, like animals, we can be slaughtered if someone has the power and the inclination to do it.
Add to this spiritual emptiness an entertainment culture of film, music, and video games so many of which are grotesquely violent and pornographic and the surprise is not that young people wantonly kill but that they don't do it more often than they do.
People immersed in what passes for entertainment in much of our culture become desensitized to death. They learn to see others as targets to be "blown away", not as people to be loved.
Some will object that lots of people play these games, listen to violent music, watch movies depicting mass slaughter, and yet they don't kill others. But this misses the point. People reside on a spectrum at one end of which are the most psychopathic among us. The more we revel in bloodshed and horror the more the spectrum gets shifted. Everyone becomes a little more desensitized, a little more hardened. Everyone tends to see others as a little less valuable than they would have, and some who would not otherwise be inclined to actually carry out their murderous fantasies now are and others who would not otherwise be inclined to harbor such fantasies now do.
Tragedies like yesterday's will recur as long as we continue to erode away the religious foundation upon which any morality must stand and substitute in its stead a culture that glories in violence, death, and horror. Just as we are what we feed our bodies, we are what we feed our minds.
If this is correct, and I'm convinced that it is at least a major part of the problem, then the long-term solution to mass murders in our schools is to recapture the spiritual understanding that we have lost in this country and to reject the culture of death the adults among us so blithely tolerate and our young so eagerly embrace.
We'll take up the short-term solution in another post.
RLC
I don't agree with everything Pat Buchanan says in this essay, but I agree with much of it. Don Imus deserved censure and firing for what he said, but the hypocrisy surrounding his lynching has grown galling. His offense was not that he uttered racist remarks or called the girls "nappy-headed." His offense, in my mind, was that he called the girls "whores," a gratuitous insult that was utterly reprehensible.
Imus lived by the arrogant, mean aspersion and he died by it, so it's hard to feel sorry for him. Had he called my daughters what he called the Rutgers women, I would have been incensed. But, having said that, to have this episode magnified into an act of vicious racism, which it was not, and to have the media set up Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, two of the most shameless race baiters and bigots of our time, as moral inquisitors is worse than absurd.
The real problem, as Buchanan points out, is not with people like Imus - who has done much good despite his execrable radio persona - the real problem is with a dysfunctional, degenerate entertainment culture, populated in large measure by black rappers, actors, actresses, and music video dancers, which facilitates and celebrates the degradation of women. Yet these people not only don't get punished, they are often richly compensated. Not only do the Sharptons and Jacksons of the world not demand that the financiers and enablers of this debasement of our culture stop rewarding those who actually do the dirty work, but they are not infrequently seen enjoying their company.
But read Buchanan's column. He says it better than I can. And see here and here for more of our views on this whole sordid affair.
RLC
The latest attempt to employ art in the cause of destroying Christianity is a loathsome piece of work by a person named Eric Medine who has produced a video game that depicts Christ as a homocidal maniac that the player needs to shoot in order to win. The game is called "Christ Killa."
The press release of the gallery displaying the game says this:
Described as the ultimate arbitration between politics and Christianity, "Christ Killa" is a video game linked to video projectors and television monitors. A first person shooter in which the player shoots hordes of homicidal Jesus Christs, the game landscape is filled with Googled images of Christian propaganda posters, religious shrines such as St. Peter's in Rome, and clichèd representations of Christ who constantly mumbles messages of tolerance and compassion.
The audience is invited to participate in the carnage by playing the video game and watching short videos of the game in action. The winner with most Christ kills will be awarded with a trophy at 9:00PM.
Sounds like great fun, I suppose, for those of a certain warped and undeveloped mentality. Michelle Malkin, after showing other memorable examples of art that sought to degrade or demean the person of Christ, issues this challenge to the edgy and intrepid "artist," Mr. Medine:
You want edgy? Go ahead and create "Mohammed Killa." Replace the Homicidal Jesus Christs with Homicidal Mohammeds mumbling clichèd messages of peace from the Koran. Fill the "game landscape" with Googled images of Muslim propaganda and sacred mosques while the Homicidal Mohammeds blow themselves up in crowded schools, restaurants, buses, and markets.
Put that on exhibit. Go ahead. Be a maaaverick "artist." Show us how brave you are at offending all people of faith.
Of course, people like Medine generally decline such invitations as Michelle's. They'd rather stick to offending people who are no threat to them. To do "Mohammed Killa" would require a degree of courage beyond the attainments of most emotional and psychological juveniles.
RLC
Jason sends a link to a column by Jonah Goldberg in which he laments that conservatives have no dog in the 2008 fight. Goldberg's right about this, of course, and in fact, conservatives haven't had a dog in the fight since 1984. The Bushes (W. and H.W.) are more conservative than Michael Dukakis, Al Gore or John Kerry, but they're actually something of an ideological hybrid. Nor are any of the top three candidates in this year's Republican field conservatives, at least not on most economic and social issues.
Whether this is good or bad we leave to the reader to decide for him or herself. We mention it only to contrast it with the MSM's inability to distinguish between Republicans and conservatives. In the MSM's world there are the good guys in the Democratic party and there are conservatives who must be defeated by any means necessary. The conservatives can be identified because they have the scarlet letter R (for Reprobate, perhaps) next to their name.
Goldberg points out why this is such a false picture of the way things really are and why, at this moment in history, liberalism actually dominates both political parties. It's an interesting essay.
RLC
Some atheists, like Sam Harris, insist that the reason for their unbelief is that there's just not enough evidence to persuade them that there is a God, but how much evidence would be enough? Would any amount of evidence ever suffice to persuade those who don't wish to believe? Blaise Pascal once said that the fact of the matter is that there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not already dead set against it. Whether this is true or not, one has the suspicion that the alleged lack of evidence often serves as a rationalization for skepticism about a God that the skeptic doesn't want to believe in anyway.
Be that as it may, there are, of course, other reasons people offer as justifications for disbelief. Three of these are:
Setting aside the question of whether any of these is an understandable explanation for why a person may wish to have nothing to do with Christians or the Christian church, it should be mentioned that, except perhaps for the first, these are not good reasons not to believe in God. The matter of God's existence is an issue entirely independent of the question of the truth of any sectarian religious doctrine.
Even so, let's consider them in reverse order. Some who hold no belief in the existence of God argue that Christians have too often shown themselves to be no better than anyone else, and of course there's much truth to this. Christians are sinners just as others are. All of us are weak, we stumble, we fail - often. How does it follow from this, though, that there is no God?
The poor behavior of some Christians is irrelevant to the question of whether there is a good and just Creator. It is instead simply an indication that some Christians, like most people, have a hard time synchronizing their behavior with their beliefs.
Likewise, the murderous behavior of Muslim extremists who claim to be acting on behalf of God does not in any way make it less likely that God exists. At most, it only makes it much less likely that their conception of God is accurate.
One moral advantage, however, that Christian theists have over skeptics is that they have an objective ideal (Christ) of what they should be like toward which to strive and a powerful motive (gratitude) for doing so. The non-theist has neither of these. He has no moral reason to behave other than in ways which conform to his feelings. If the Christian theist feels like doing something hurtful to another he might do it, but he knows it's wrong, and he feels guilt. The non-theist has no reason to think it's wrong and no reason to feel guilty.
The person who rejects God because of disillusionment with Christians is making an irrational choice. The rational course would be to ask God to connect her with people who take their faith seriously and who strive, however imperfectly, to live their lives in conformity to the ideal set for us in Jesus Christ. There are, after all, multitudes of them out there.
More on this topic later.
RLC
I recently finished Richard Weikert's outstanding book From Darwin to Hitler (2004). Weikert has written a tour de force in which he argues compellingly that the Nazi holocaust was not an isolated historical aberration but was rather a logical consequence of the conflation of two streams of thought that had been flowing through Germany for seventy years.
The first stream was an increasing secularism that reduced Christianity and Christian morality to an irrelevance. The Christian emphasis on compassion for the weak, poor, and oppressed was supplanted by an emphasis, deriving in large part from Neitszche, on strength and will. The Christian belief that morality was grounded in the will of a benevolent, omniscient God was replaced with the belief that morality was a product of the struggle for advantage among groups competing for their very survival. Once German intellectuals lost faith in a transcendent moral authority it was but a short step to an egoistic, pragmatic version of might makes right.
This meshed neatly with the conlusions of a Darwinian world-view which stressed the survival of the fittest, the inferiority of some kinds of people vis a vis others, and the possibility of improving the fitness of the human species through genetic selection and the removal of competitors.
These ideas manifested themselves in the 19th century in the German eugenics movement which sought to improve mankind through selective breeding and the abortion and euthanization of the sick, infirm, and deformed. As the twentieth century approached more German scholars and opinion makers extended these principles to the competition between races so that "inferior" peoples were seen as subject to the Darwinian laws of extinction. It was no distance at all from there to the conclusion that war against the inferior kinds of humans was morally justified in Darwinian and Neitszchean terms.
In a secular world might makes right and the interest of the stronger is the only defensible ethic. Survival in the competition for resources and living space was ipso facto proof of one's fitness and the ends of survival and dominance justified any means for many prominent Germans prior to the 1920s.
Weikert doesn't simply assert these historical and philosophical trends, he documents them from the writings of numerous infuential German thinkers from the 1860s through the 1920s. In fact, if the book has a shortcoming it is that after awhile the mountain of evidence Weikert amasses begins to get in the way of reading the history.
The author is at pains to insist that Darwinist materialism doesn't necessarily lead to Hitler. It might not have, of course, but what he shows beyond cavil is that the path that history followed was indeed widened, paved, and lit by the ideas of Darwinists and atheists following their assumptions to what they saw as their logical conclusions. It was an historical march made much easier by the demise of a robust Church in Germany and by the notion that any morality worthy of the name had to be grounded in the improvement of the human species.
Whether Weikert is right or wrong I leave to historians to decide but that he is persuasive cannot be gainsaid.
His book is scholarly, and the reader looking for something casual or light will probably find it difficult to finish. Reading it to the end, however, will surely repay anyone who perseveres.
RLC
Due to the number of people who have written to tell me that they didn't think that the argument in Hard to Refute was hard to refute at all, I feel I need to announce that the post was a parody.
RLC
Vincent Carroll of The Rocky Mountain News offers his opinion of what he sees as the most astonishing feature of the Duke rape case:
...the most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante colleagues to set the tone. K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College, has followed every twist in the Duke scandal on his Durham-in- Wonderland Web site. He chronicles the faculty's performance as the hysteria mounted.
"In late March (2006)," Johnson writes, "Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies, issued a public letter denouncing the 'abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us' and demanding the 'immediate dismissals' of 'the team itself and its players.' A week later, on April 6, 88 members of Duke's arts and sciences faculty signed a public statement saying 'thank you' to campus demonstrators who had distributed a 'wanted' poster of the lacrosse players and publicly branded the players 'rapists.' By contrast, no Duke professor publicly criticized Nifong's conduct."
David Evans, one of the accused, told 60 Minutes that he moved out of the house where the rapes of a black stripper allegedly occurred because of menacing mobs. The Duke president, no profile in courage, canceled the lacrosse season and fired the coach. As recently as a few months ago President Richard Brodhead was still defending the 88 professors who trampled on the presumption of innocence, going so far as to describe some of them as victims, too.
A few Duke professors did acquit themselves well or eventually locate some semblance of a spine. Law professor James Coleman denounced Nifong's handling of police lineups. Seventeen members of the Duke economics department signed a letter in January criticizing Nifong and assuring student athletes they were welcome in their classrooms.
But for the most part the faculty either supported the branding of three athletes as racists and rapists, didn't care enough about their plight to speak out, or were cowed into suppressing any call of conscience.
Would those athletes, facing a similarly dubious claim of rape, have fared any better at America's other elite universities? The idealist yearns to answer yes. The realist, sad to say, knows better.
As we said the other day, the faculties of elite American universities are predominately leftists for whom the most important thing in life is their ideology. They have committed themselves to certain core assumptions about gender, race, and class that led them to conclude prior to the production of any evidence, and solely on the basis of a black woman's allegation, that those young white men were guilty as charged.
Everything else followed as night follows the day. The university president fired the lacrosse coach, holding him responsible for the putative sins of his players. The young students were made the object of invective and slander by such stalwart defenders of the rights of the accused as the New York Times. The leftist community across the nation, quick to march on behalf of convicted cop-killers like Mumia Abu-Jamal, had no time for the Duke white kids.
Some of them are still convinced that the young men are guilty. A lawyer on television last night said that she's convinced that "something happened in that house." Well, yes, I'm sure something did happen. I'm sure that some of the people in the house, perhaps the three that were charged, wanted her to do more than she was willing. They probably insulted her when she refused and maybe even called her nasty names, inspiring her, out of anger, to concoct the rape story as a means of revenge. If so, their behavior was shameful and degrading, but it wasn't illegal. Nor was it much different, unfortunately, than what happens on campuses all across the nation every weekend.
District Attorney Mike Nifong, and the Duke faculty and administration, would have happily put these students in prison for a dozen years or more, simply on the assumption that if a black woman claims that rich white boys raped her then it must be true. It's true because leftists have inculcated into each other for decades that women don't lie about rape. It's true because it captures what the left believes has been the narrative of race, class, and gender in this country throughout our history (For a modest example, see the second part of this essay). It's true because all truth must be interpreted through the lens of that historical experience - there are no "objective" facts of the matter which we need be concerned about.
The sacrifice of these students on the altar of ideology served a higher purpose. Belief in the guilt of these privileged, white males has "purchase," it "resonates" with and validates the left's entire worldview, and, like their unwavering belief in the innocence of Alger Hiss, the tale of what happened in that house will live on in the mythology of the left for generations to come.
RLC
How can anyone doubt that living things, or at least bananas, are intelligently designed after seeing this?
RLC
Allahpundit throws down the gauntlet to the Pelosicrats: He asks them, in effect, to please explain precisely what principles guide their policy on foreign interventions. His request was triggered by this astonishing statement by Senator Joseph Biden:
Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democratic presidential candidate, called Wednesday for the use of military force to end the suffering in Darfur.
"I would use American force now," Biden said at a hearing before his committee. "I think it's not only time not to take force off the table. I think it's time to put force on the table and use it."
In advocating use of military force, Biden said senior U.S. military officials in Europe told him that 2,500 U.S. troops could "radically change the situation on the ground now."
"Let's stop the bleeding," Biden said. "I think it's a moral imperative."
Allahpundit wants to know why it's a moral imperative to intervene in Darfur where we have no national interest but not a moral imperative to stay in Iraq even though leaving there too soon could precipitate a humanitarian disaster that would far exceed the one in Darfur.
He also wonders what guides the Dems' decision to refuse to talk to George Bush about funding our troops in Iraq when they're willing to travel all the way to Syria to talk to the murderous tyrant Bashar Assad who supports Islamic terrorism throughout the world. The Dems also refuse to debate on Fox News but they have no qualms about being seen and feted in Damascus, the hub of world terrorism. Exactly what principles are consulted in the making of these decisions?
The Democrats seem totally incoherent about how the U.S. should exercise its power and influence in the world because, I suspect, their prescriptions are not arrived at as a result of the application of any kind of principle at all, except the principle of political expediency. The rule seems to be: Observe what George Bush is doing, condemn it, and urge something different. That's a principle of sorts, I guess, but not one that commends the moral or intellectual gifts of those who govern by it.
RLC
The debate is over. The Darwinians have won. This computer simulation proves it. All those who invested their epistemic lives in Intelligent Design must now slink abjectly onto the dust heap of history.
If you watch the sim be sure to read the comments. My favorite is #7: "...how showing something that was programmed to change proves that things change without programming is beyond me." Me too.
RLC
According to Strategy Page high-ranking defections are becoming a real worry in North Korea:
April 8, 2007: The North Korean regime has issued a strong "reminder" to its diplomats, and other personnel stationed abroad, that they are not to have more than one child with them on a foreign posting. This suggests North Korea is worried about possible defections by diplomats, consular officials, business agents, etc., who've got their wives and kids with them in some foreign country. If they can only take one child with them, those that remain home essentially become hostages to their good behavior. The North Korean government has become increasingly alarmed at the number of diplomats defecting and, even worse, those who stick around, but in the pay for American, South Korean and Chinese intelligence agencies.
The response to this order was startling; many of these parents have refused to send children back to North Korea. To old North Korea hands, such defiance to authority is startling. But these North Korea government officials know their country is a basket case, and are willing to risk losing their jobs, rather than send any of their children back to a home country that is, day-by-day, becoming a hellish parody of the communist "workers paradise."
Historians of communism consider North Korea the pinnacle of police state perfection. Josef Stalin would be envious, or maybe proud, because Stalin was one of the founding fathers of North Korea. The degree of state control in North Korea is far in excess of anything ever achieved in the Soviet Union. But this was achieved using a population already disciplined by centuries of efficient feudalism, and several decades of Japanese colonialism. The Japanese were very disciplined, very strict and very brutal.
By comparison, the North Korean communist government was something of a relief. Moreover, the North Korean communists worked the nationalist and cultural angle successfully. Because of the total control of the media, the North Korean communists created an alternate universe for their subjects to live in.
As small numbers of North Koreans managed to escape over the years, and make their way to South Korea, usually via China, it was amazing to see the culture shock. The North Korean refugees were numbed by the degree of difference between the fantasy view of the outside world created by the North Korea communists and the reality.
But in the last decade reality has seeped into the Perfect Police State, changing the attitudes of the guards as well as the inmates. True Believers have been gradually replaced by Practical Pretenders. What's happening now, with North Korean government officials openly defying their government while pretending not to, is the best example of how North Korea culture is evolving. It's weird, it's wretched, and, in a perverse way, wonderful.
Yes but is it enough to cause them to give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons?
RLC
People on both sides of the debate about the existence of God occasionally cite the views of Albert Einstein as providing support for their side. This is tricky business since Einstein's views were unorthodox. He was not a theist who believed in a personal God nor was he an atheist who discarded the idea of God altogether.
He was, in fact, a good example of a modern deist who believed that there is some force or intellect which established the moral and physical laws of the universe but which does not interfere with those laws in any way. Einstein did not believe in life after death and did not believe that humans possessed free will, although he did believe that we have to live as if we are free.
The current issue of Time has an interesting column by Walter Isaacson on Einstein's religion which explores these beliefs in more detail. It's worth a read for those curious as to what, exactly, Einstein thought about God.
RLC
I was watching Meet the Press last Sunday morning and was appalled to hear Chuck Todd of NBC News suggest that were he a Republican what he would advise them to do is let the Democrats have their way on the Iraq war, let things devolve into chaos after we pull out, and then capitalize on Democratic ineptitude in the 2008 election.
I was astonished that a prominent news commentator would so baldly place political success above peoples' lives. Rarely is a public figure willing to be seen as so utterly unprincipled as to sacrifice tens of thousands of innocent lives in order to make political hay out of the debacle. Yet that's what this Democrat cynically advises the Republicans to do.
Here's the exchange, which was triggered by discussion of Bush's promise to veto the Democrats bill authorizing funding for the troops and setting a timetable for withdrawal:
MR. CHUCK TODD: What I don't understand [about] what the White House is doing is that every time Democrats propose something that allows them to potentially take co-ownership of the war, Bush actually stops them, and politically it actually puts the Democrats in an advantageous position because they can sit there and say, "Well, you know what, we've tried to take some responsibility for this war. The president won't do it. He's vetoing this legislation. This is still Bush's war. This is still a Republican war." And that's sort of the frustration that I'm sensing from some Republicans, not, not inside the White House, but on Capital Hill and on the campaign trail a little bit, to sit there and say, "Guys, let the Democrats share some ownership of this thing or this war's going to make 2006 seem like a party." In 2008 it's going to be a real death knell for the Republican Party.
MR. RUSSERT: So if you're a real cynic, you can say all right, let the Democrats have their way, let them set the deadline of March or August of '08.
MR. TODD: And let them own this war. That's right.
MR. RUSSERT: Start bringing the troops home then. Chaos breaks out, you say that's the Democratic solution.
MR. TODD: That's right. "We tried it - we tried it - we tried it your way," and then suddenly it's a referendum on, well, do you want the Republicans to run this war or the Democrats to run this war? And you've gotten a taste of what it would look like if the Democrats ran this war.
And then what? What does Todd think we should do when Iraq spirals into chaos and the whole Middle East is in flames - point fingers at each other and say, "It's all your fault"? This is an incredibly repugnant piece of advice, as impractical as it is immoral. Todd, of course, would love to see the president acquiesce to timetables for withdrawals and he's trying to argue that this would in fact be a good political move for the president. On the contrary, it would be utterly reprehensible and Todd's cynicism should be lambasted by his media colleagues.
But of course it won't be.
RLC
It was hard to have come of age in the 60s without having read something by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's novels Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You Mr. Rosewater (1965), and SlaughterHouse Five (1969) captured the spirit of that turbulent time better than perhaps anything else that young people were reading. Among other contributions his work made these novels presaged the ripening of modernity's twin fruits of nihilism and meaninglessness that have afflicted European and American culture since the 70s.
Vonnegut died yesterday from brain injuries suffered during a fall some weeks ago. So it goes.
*Read the poem at the link.
RLC
What sort of person must a man be who knowingly destroys the reputations of three young men, wrecks the lives of all their families, ruins an athletic season for dozens more, all on the testimony of a notoriously unreliable witness who the man, a district attorney, had every reason to know was lying? It seems hard to believe that anyone could be that contemptible but that's precisely what Michael Nifong did in the Duke "rape" case.
What his motives were is unclear. Some speculated that he saw a political opportunity to ingratiate himself with the African-American community and the ideological left by pressing charges against privileged white males accused of raping a black woman. It turns out that the woman was a liar, both emotionally and mentally unstable, and whatever Nifong's intentions were in prosecuting this case he clearly was guilty, at best, of total incompetence and at worst of prosecutorial abuse in being willing to destroy the lives of people he knew were innocent.
Now he faces eviction from the North Carolina Bar as well as civil suits which will almost certainly be brought against him by the families of the students. His career as a lawyer and a politician is evidently over. He'll doubtless be paying damages to the families for the rest of his life. If so, he'll be getting what he deserves.
We might hope that next somebody gets after the 88 Duke faculty who signed a letter condemning the accused boys before the whole world, and the craven president of the university who acted as if the students were guilty before any evidence had been produced against them.
We might also hope that somebody calls to account the various race hustlers, like Jesse Jackson, who were so blinded by their own racism that they assumed that a black girl known to be of dubious virtue was more credible than the protestations of innocence of privileged white boys.
The whole episode highlights the moral poverty and intellectual bankruptcy of common liberal assumptions about race, class and gender and the utter fatuousness of political correctness. Many liberals are so invested in the dogma that a woman who claims rape is not lying, they're so committed to the mythology of the exploitation of black women at the hands of white men, that the young Duke students were, in their minds, guilty as a matter of course.
What is on trial in the Duke imbroglio is more than the abuses of one arrogant, cruel, and stupid prosecutor. What is on trial in Durham is the mindset of many in the secular far left which demands that justice be subordinated to ideology. A lot of people have, in this sordid episode, vividly demonstrated that they are willing to believe anything, no matter how vile, about wealthy white men if the allegation against them is made by a black woman. That tells us a great deal about where the locus of racism and sexism is to be found in this country.
RLC
Our post Demeaning Blacks elicited a number of questions about what, exactly, my point was. Did I think it inappropriate to compliment blacks, some wondered. Am I so PC that I think that anything a white person says to a black person is automatically suspicious?
Well, no, but I do think that there are assumptions buried in much of what we say about matters of race, and some of those assumptions would surprise us if we were aware of them. I think they would especially surprise liberals since these folk often make a special effort to demonstrate that they are certainly not racist, even if those rednecks for whom they have such disdain are.
The basic purpose of our original post was to observe that when someone says about a black man that he's "articulate," the tacit meaning of the statement is that "he's articulate for a black man." This is a compliment to the individual, I suppose, but in my view it's an insult to blacks in general. The assumption on the part of the speaker is that it's not the norm to find a black man who can speak properly. The fact that one rarely hears whites described this way is evidence that articulateness is taken for granted among whites but not among blacks and that the speaker is mildly surprised to encounter a black man who expresses himself in standard English.
When I was growing up I used to hear people say about some handsome celebrity that he's "a good-looking black man." They didn't say that he's a good-looking man but that he's a good-looking black man. What they were actually asserting, without realizing it, probably, was that the celebrity was good-looking for a black man, as if black attractiveness is to be measured on a different, and doubtless more relaxed, scale than that of whites.
I thought this was insulting to blacks then, and I think the "articulate" compliment is, for the same reason, insulting now - not to the individual, of course, but to African-Americans in general.
The funny thing is that neither the person who insults by voicing the compliment nor the person who is complimented usually realizes what's really being said and what assumptions give rise to it.
Perhaps it would be interesting when we hear someone say that so and so is "articulate" to ask them if that surprises them. The question might help to expose the unfortunate assumptions that underlie their observation.
RLC
Our Feedback page has an interesting reply from a student to a post from a while back that addressed several myths about intelligent design. The student believes that these claims are not myths at all, but are indeed accurate criticisms of ID. I encourage readers to check out his argument.
I've copied my reply to him here:
Excellent reply A_. I'm very impressed with your knowledge of this issue. Let me see if I can respond to your critique of the three myths you address.
You wrote that:
Myth #1: The theory of intelligent design is a modern version of Creationism.
Right or wrong it is true that in our country the modern interpretation of ID comes from fundamental creationist Christians. The Dover trial clearly proved this. This does not mean that ID is not true. It only means that in our society, the vast majority of those that buy into the "faith" in ID happen to be Christians. It may be true that abstractly ID goes back deep in history, but it is not a myth that the modern rebirth of ID is a Christian mechanism to reduce what Christians see as the corrupting influence of Darwinism on the youth.
It is true that most, though not all, proponents of ID are Christians and that ID can trace it's lineage back to earlier creationists. It does not follow, however, that ID is a modern version of Creationism any more than the fact that chemistry can trace its lineage to alchemy or astronomy to astrology means that these sciences are modern versions of their predecessors. Chemistry is not alchemy and ID is not Creationism.
The theoretical structure of Creationism is completely different than that of ID. Creationism depends upon the literal truth of Genesis and upon the creator being the God of the Bible. ID doesn't. Creationism is incompatible with macroevolution. ID isn't. If Genesis were shown to be false and God not to exist, Creationism would be destroyed, but ID as a theory would be unscathed.
The fact that most ID proponents are Christians is irrelevant to the validity of the theory. Suppose most evolutionists were Christians (many are). Would that count against the truth of evolution? Or suppose that most atheists are Darwinians (which they are). Does that count against the truth of Darwinism?
You also wrote:
Myth #2: The theory of intelligent design claims that the designer is the God described in the Bible.
Well, in fact, the modern view is indeed a Christian invention. The modern ID movement is one that has been fueled almost entirely by "The Discovery Institute". There is no dispute over the fact that the Discovery Institute is a Christian based organization.
If one were to simply ask Americans that believe in ID the question: if there is an intelligent designer what or who do you think it is? ....it is undeniably true that the vast majority of those Americans would answer that the designer is none other one or all of the Holy Trinity. Even though, at a philosophical level it is true that ID in no way implies any specific God or even a God at all.
The fact that the DI is comprised of Christians or that many ID proponents believe that the designer is the Judeo-Christian God does not mean that it must be God. There is nothing in ID theory or literature which makes a necessary connection between the two. The fact that most people believe that the designer is God does not weigh against the theory of ID any more than the fact that most people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald had an accomplice when he shot JFK weighs against the theory that he acted alone.
The designer could be an alien residing in some other galaxy, it could be an inhabitant of the multiverse, it could be a Platonic demiurge, it could be a Hegelian universal spirit, or it could be the God of Christianity. ID takes no position on the identity of the designer.
Myth #3 "Conservatives and Christians necessarily accept the intelligent design argument".
This would only be a myth if it said that all Christians accept ID. Nevertheless, it does seem true that very few non-Christians or non-conservatives believe in the ID "religion".
The word necessarily means the same thing as logically must so the above sentence in the myth is equivalent to saying that all Christians logically must accept ID; they cannot be a Christian and not accept it. It's like saying that if a figure is a triangle then it must have three angles. It cannot be a triangle and have four angles. It is not the case, of course, that Christians must accept ID in the same way that they must accept that a triangle has three angles and that's why it's a myth to say that the two are logically connected. Indeed, some of ID's most effective opponents are Christians (Ken Miller of Brown, for example).
Likewise, from the fact that few non-Christians accept ID one cannot conclude that therefore Christians must accept it. That would be like arguing that because few Democrats support the president that therefore Republicans must (in the logical sense, not the practical sense) support him.
Anyway, you did an outstanding job with this critique, A_, and I hope you continue to follow the debate on this issue. We post on it often at Viewpoint. ID may in the end turn out to be false. It may be that it's not good science (though it's certainly philosophy of science), but right now it's a much more powerful and compelling idea than it's detractors would have us believe, and few of the arguments against it seem, to me at least, very convincing.
RLC