Politics of Personal Destruction

As predicted, Herman Cain is being drawn and quartered by the media for alleged inappropriate behavior over a decade ago. If he's guilty it's certainly something the voters should know, but the way this sordid episode has been handled and the media feeding frenzy that has resulted, raise several questions.

Given that most successful people in business and politics have something in their past they wouldn't want made the topic of world-wide interest, why would anyone want to put themselves through the incredibly absurd and brutal process we call a political campaign? Our contemporary political process is designed to all but insure that the winner will be either the most ruthless, the most dishonest, or the most bland and enigmatic candidate in the race. It's no wonder that people like Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie don't want to run. Why put your family through this?

I also wonder how many of the people who are seeking to destroy Cain by publicizing these allegations and pillorying him in the media stood by President Clinton when he was accused of doing far worse than merely making a woman feel uncomfortable. Clinton was accused by Juanita Broaddrick of rape, by Kathleen Willey of sexual assault (while consoling her over the death of her husband), and by Paula Jones of indecent exposure. Moreover, he had extramarital affairs with at least five women while governor of Arkansas and was convicted of perjury while serving as president, but none of that seemed to matter to his supporters, many of whom would gladly vote for him again and many of whom are among those condemning Herman Cain for unspecified acts which made several women "feel uncomfortable".

Finally, why are reporters tripping all over each other to rush unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct against Cain into print when they sat on substantiated allegations of John Edwards philandering and his "love child" until Edwards was no longer a presidential candidate and there was no doubt about the nature of his pathetic behavior?

I don't know what Cain did. If it was sexually inappropriate that certainly reflects poorly on his suitability for high office, but whatever he did it wasn't as bad as what either Clinton or Edwards did, both of whom were given a pass by the people who are today delightedly destroying Cain. Nor was Cain's behavior as sleazy as that of a hypocritical media which staunchly defended President Clinton and slandered his accusers, but is determined to ruin a man whose offenses were far milder but who poses a serious threat to the reelection of the incumbent president.

The Ongoing Controversy

The global warming debate continues and is starting to look a bit like a soap opera.

Last week Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project team - a scientist who had formerly been skeptical of the claims that the earth was inexorably warming - rocked the climate science world by releasing a paper in which he reversed his former skepticism and acknowledged that he now believed that man-caused, or anthropogenic, global warming (APG) was an indisputable fact. His new position was quickly repudiated, however, by a prominent colleague at BEST who argued that Prof. Muller was hiding data that completely negated his argument that the earth's temperature is rising.

Here's part of the story:

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST), claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilization as we know it.

It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.

The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a skeptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’. But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming skeptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis. Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago. Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill. ‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no leveling off’. But a report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project’s data and revealed on its website.

This graph shows that the trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.

These are the graphs which appeared in The Mail's article:

‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’ In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected skeptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading .... However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.

Well, the mystification is understandable if, as the article tells us, Prof. Muller had previously insisted that there's no evidence that global warming was at a standstill.

At any rate, it certainly seems that since 1998 global temperatures have not risen even though we have continued to pump CO2 into the atmosphere. This is inexplicable given the predictions of global warming alarmists and suggests that climate change/stability is a much more complicated affair than a simple correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and temperature.

What the truth of the matter is I certainly don't know, but I do think it's safe to say that when people like Al Gore insist that the science is settled on APG they don't know what they're talking about.

Lord of the Flies

The Occupations, or at least some of them, appear to be devolving into what you might expect - chaos, bickering, and crime. If the Democrats had hoped to exploit this unrest and dissatisfaction for political gain, they're doubtless reconsidering now.

Here's a sample of what's happening in Baltimore:

Via Hot Air

Darwin and Hitler

A piece by Richard Weikert, author of the excellent book From Darwin to Hitler, recently caught my eye. Weikert recounts being interviewed by a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer who challenged his claim that Darwinists have no grounds upon which to judge the morality of Adolph Hitler, or anyone else, for that matter. Here's part of his account:

When the Philadelphia Inquirer's science writer Faye Flam interviewed me recently for her article "Severing the Link Between Darwin and Nazism," she pressed me to discuss the implications of the Darwinism-Nazism connection that my scholarship has explored (especially in my two books, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany and Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress).

I threw down the gauntlet to many of my Darwinian opponents by telling her that if Darwinism is indeed a purposeless, non-teleological process, as many evolutionists and biology textbooks proclaim, and if morality is the product of these mindless evolutionary processes, as Darwin and many other prominent Darwinists maintain, then "I don't think [they] have any grounds to criticize Hitler."

According to Flam, these are "fighting words." However, I have spoken with intelligent Darwinists who admit point-blank that they do not have any grounds to condemn Hitler, so I am not just making this up. Many evolutionists believe that since evolution explains the origin of morality -- as Darwin himself argued -- then there is no objective morality. The famous evolutionary biologist and founder of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson, and the prominent philosopher of science Michael Ruse co-authored an article on evolutionary ethics in which they asserted, "Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate."

This is obviously not an undisputed point among Darwinists, but it is a position embraced by many leading Darwinists, and it does seem to reflect Darwin's own position. If indeed ethics is an illusion, merely the product of mindless, purposeless processes, it is hard to see what basis Darwinists could have to condemn Hitler morally.

Indeed, on several occasions I have asked those committed to the evolutionary origins of morality about the implications of their views: "Can you say then that Hitler is objectively evil or not?" Usually, they reluctantly admit to me that they have no objective basis to condemn Hitler or any other purveyors of atrocities.

Richard Dawkins himself says precisely this, as we've pointed out on previous occasions: "What's to prevent us from saying," Dawkins asks, "that Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." And Dawkins is far from being the only naturalistic scientist who has arrived at this conclusion.

There's much more of interest in Weikert's post. For example, it's clear that Flam really doesn't understand the nature of the problem for the belief that we have moral obligations that's posed by naturalism:

[Flam] argues that "Darwin himself wrote that violence, selfishness, charity, and goodwill are all part of human nature. He hoped that we would choose to act on the better parts." Wait a minute. Where did this notion of "better" come from? If Flam is taking a fully naturalistic Darwinian perspective, as she seems to be, with evolution being a purposeless, non-teleological process, why does she think that charity and goodwill are any "better" than violence and selfishness.

According to the Darwinian account of the origin of morality, all these character traits allegedly helped humans adapt to their present environment in the struggle for existence. All of these are "natural" behaviors, as are genocide, rape, murder, and theft, or honesty, self-sacrifice, and altruism. What arbitrates between these behaviors? Who can say that any of these behaviors are "better" than any others?

She concludes her article by asking, "If our lives really did hinge on countless accidents, couldn't that notion make life ever more precious?" Again, she is smuggling ideas into her argument that are fundamentally incompatible with her worldview. "Precious" implies that something has value, meaning, and significance; indeed it means that something has more value than other things.

However, a naturalistic understanding of Darwinism cannot sustain the notion that life is precious, because everything, not just life, is the product of chance and would be equally valuable, making life no more precious than anything else in the cosmos. A lump of coal or a dung heap is every bit as much the product of countless accidents as you are. Does that make them precious? Many Darwinists today, such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, reject the idea that human life is special and has any meaning or purpose.

Flam's problem is that, like so many other naturalistic materialists, she's piggy-backing on Christian theism without realizing it. She's assuming that naturalism need not diminish our view that life is full of meaning and that human beings have objective moral duties, when in fact naturalism erases both of these. Naturalists like Flam insist that theism is false but live as if it were true, and the contradiction doesn't trouble them because they're blithely unaware of it.

The droll thing about this is that, while living as if the thing they claim to be false is really true, they're happy to proclaim to one and all that Christianity is irrational.

Flam responds to Weikert, rather weakly in my view, here.

Taking Down the Sign

It turns out that the atheist group which paid several thousand dollars to put up this billboard is ignominiously taking it down. A thorough search was unable to corroborate that Thomas Jefferson said anything close to what the billboard claims he said:

So, not only is there no evidence Jefferson ever said such a thing, but Mr.Gleason is incorrect in asserting that it nevertheless expresses his true feelings. Not only is there much evidence to the contrary, but only a complete historical illiterate could say that there's not one redeeming feature of Christianity. I think it safe to say that Jefferson would have been offended that such ignorance was imputed to him.

The atheist group that sponsored the sign is not only historically benighted they're also pusillanimous. Here's a test: Unless one is willing to put up a similar billboard saying the same about Islam they really shouldn't put up a sign derogating Christianity. It takes no courage to criticize people you know will do nothing more serious to you than pray for you. It does take courage, however, to broadcast the same message about a religion whose devotees will do all they can to cut off your head for saying it.

Moreover, is this the best that the Cosa Mesa atheists can do with $4000? How many meals would that money have provided in a soup kitchen? How many elderly could have their utility bills paid with that amount? How many vaccines could be purchased for destitute Africans? What good comes from spending the money on an effort to dispirit and discredit the very people who are actually doing these things?

HT: The Blaze

The Handy Hammer of Hate

The Washington Post takes note of how hate is being used by the left as a tool to censor legitimate debate in our public square. It's significant, I think, that this article, which is critical of the left, appeared in the Post which is one of the more liberal newspapers in the land. Here's the gist of it:

In the debates over gay marriage, "hate" is the ultimate conversation-stopper.

Some stories from recent months: A religion instructor at a midwestern state university explains in an e-mail to students the rational basis for Catholic teaching on homosexuality. He is denounced by a student for "hate speech" and is dismissed from his position. (He is later reinstated - for now.)

At another midwestern state university, a department chairman demurs from a student organizer's request that his department promote an upcoming "LGBTQ" film festival on campus; he is denounced to his university's chancellor, who indicates that his e-mail to the student warrants inquiry by a "Hate and Bias Incident Response Team."

On the west coast, a state law school moves to marginalize a Christian student group that requires its members to pledge they will conform to orthodox Christian doctrines on sexual morality. In the history of the school, no student group has ever been denied campus recognition. But this one is, and the U.S. Supreme Court lets the school get away with it.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a once-respected civil rights organization, publishes a "report" identifying a dozen or so "anti-gay hate groups," some for no apparent reason other than their vocal opposition to same-sex marriage. Other marriage advocacy groups are put on a watch list.

On a left-wing Web site, a petition drive succeeds in pressuring Apple to drop an "app" from its iTunes store for the Manhattan Declaration, an ecumenical Christian statement whose nearly half-million signers are united in defense of the right to life, the tradition of conjugal marriage between man and woman, and the principles of religious liberty. The offense? The app is a "hate fest." Fewer than 8,000 people petition for the app to go; more than five times as many petition Apple for its reinstatement, so far to no avail.

Finally, on "$#*! My Dad Says," a CBS sitcom watched by more than 10 million weekly viewers, an entire half-hour episode is devoted to a depiction of the disapproval of homosexuality as bigotry, a form of unreasoning intolerance that clings to the past with a coarse and mean-spirited judgmentalism. And this on a show whose title character is famously irascible and politically incorrect, but who in this instance turns out to be fashionably cuddly and up-to-date.

What's going on here? Clearly a determined effort is afoot, in cultural bastions controlled by the left, to anathematize traditional views of sexual morality, particularly opposition to same-sex marriage, as the expression of "hate" that cannot be tolerated in a decent civil society.

The argument over same-sex marriage must be brought to an end, and the debate considered settled. Defenders of traditional marriage must be likened to racists, as purveyors of irrational fear and loathing. Opposition to same-sex marriage must be treated just like support for now long-gone anti-miscegenation laws.

It is indeed one of the more charming habits of some liberals to label arguments or opinions they don't like a form of hatred. It would be a derisory tactic were it not for the fact that it so often works, at least with those who can't be bothered to examine such claims carefully.

Having proven itself in the past to be an effective expedient for winning debates and getting one's way, it receives frequent employment by commentators on the left. Simply accuse one's opponents of some form of bigotry, whether racial or sexual, and you effectively discredit and thus silence them without having to actually construct an intelligent argument. This is insidious because it stifles and derails the kind of open and honest discourse upon which a democratic society is nourished. But then, a lot of these folks aren't really interested in open and honest discourse, nor are they interested in a free and democratic society.

The Streetlight Effect

We've all heard the story: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a street light and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys, and so they both look under the street light together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he's sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he's searching here if the keys are in the park, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is."

I was reminded of that story reading a brief piece by the atheistic materialist David Barash. He recounts an incident after a lecture when he was asked what he thought the hardest problem in science is:

I answered without hesitation: How the brain generates awareness, thought, perceptions, emotions, and so forth, what philosophers call “the hard problem of consciousness.”

It’s a hard one indeed, so hard that despite an immense amount of research attention devoted to neurobiology, and despite great advances in our knowledge, I don’t believe we are significantly closer to bridging the gap between that which is physical, anatomical and electro-neurochemical, and what is subjectively experienced by all of us.

What Barash is putting his finger on is the problem of understanding how chemical reactions in the brain could produce sensations like color, sound, fragrance, or taste. How does a mix of neurochemicals cause us to have the experience of red or sweet?

Another aspect of this problem is explaining how electrons flowing along neurons can generate meaning when we see a paragraph of text. How do the patterns of ink on paper create an understanding in the brain? No one knows, and no one can even suggest a way to find out. This is why this is called the "hard" problem of consciousness (as opposed to the easier problem of mapping the parts of the brain that "light up" when subjected to different types of physical stimuli).

To be sure, there are lots of other hard problems, such as the perennial one of reconciling quantum theory with relativity, whether life exists on other planets, how action can occur at a distance (gravity, the attraction of opposite charges), how cells differentiate, and so forth. But in these and other cases, I can at least envisage possible solutions, even though none of mine actually work.

But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.

So what does this have to do with what's called the streetlight effect - i.e. continuing to look for an answer where it's easiest to look even though it seems pretty clear that the answer won't be found there? Well, in his next paragraph Barash describes his own "street light":

I write this as an utter and absolute, dyed-in-the-wool, scientifically oriented, hard-headed, empirically insistent, atheistically committed materialist, altogether certain that matter and energy rule the world, not mystical abracadabra. But I still can’t get any purchase on this “hard problem,” the very label being a notable understatement. Cogito ergo sum may well be the most famous phrase in Western thought, yet I am convinced that Descartes’ renowned dualism is nonsense, that mind arises from nothing more nor less than the actions of the brain. I am also nearly as confident that some day, we’ll understand how.

Rather than entertain the possibility that his worldview is inadequate to give a satisfying description of the world Barash insists on looking under the streetlight of atheistic materialism for an explanation of consciousness. Maybe the answer doesn't lie elsewhere, but wouldn't it be wise to at least admit that it might? Wouldn't it be a step in the right direction to admit that his faith commitment to materialism is just that, an act of faith that all explanations are ultimately material explanations. It's not that materialism is an ersatz religion, it's that, for people like Barash, it is a religion.

It's intriguing that even scientists, who are supposed to be the most open-minded and most liberated of thinkers, are really imprisoned in their worldview and unable to imagine that the answers they seek are actually not to be found under that particular streetlight.

Racial Catalyst

Why is it that if conservatives oppose President Obama's policies they're automatically saddled by the left with the presumption of racism, but the left can say all sorts of insulting things about Herman Cain, as a black man, and it's simply considered cogent political analysis? For many liberals, opposition to Obama is prima facie evidence of racism, but opposition to Cain is a civic duty.

Imagine what the reaction would be if someone were to insult a black Democrat the way this woman insults Cain:

There are more examples of this sort of rhetoric here. It often seems that truth, evidence and logical consistency are irrelevant to some on the left. Such bourgeois values are dismissed as encumbrances, impediments which get in the way of the effort to maintain political power. What matters is winning and whatever accomplishes that goal is justified even if it means falsely accusing others of being guilty of doing the very things one does oneself.

When people on the left accuse Cain's admirers of supporting him just so they can mask or expiate their own racism, not only do they make themselves look foolish for advancing such a ludicrous explanation of Cain's popularity, but they project, I suspect, their own deepest sentiments onto their political opponents. They themselves think this way, even if they're unaware of it, and they can't imagine how anyone else could think otherwise. That's why they never offer evidence to support their claims of racism among conservatives. It must be there, they're convinced, because they know it's common among people on their own side and in themselves.

If Cain continues to do well in the polls I fear the attacks against him and his supporters will get increasingly ugly and more explicitly personal and racial even as any legitimate criticism of the president's policies and political tactics will be portrayed as racially motivated hatred.

Most of the manifestations of racial and religious bigotry in the early years of the 21st century have been found primarily on the progressive left, and Herman Cain could well be the catalyst that, like Homer's sirens, entices it all the way out into the light of day for all to see.

Slouching Toward Violence

Some of the protestors at Occupy Phoenix have apparently had second thoughts about the effectiveness of peaceful demonstrations and are now ruminating on the ethics of shooting police officers. This was excerpted from a flyer circulated at OP:

Pick any example of abuse of power, whether it is the fascist “war on drugs,” the police thuggery that has become so common, the random stops and searches now routinely carried out in the name of “security” (e.g., at airports, “border checkpoints” that aren’t even at the border, “sobriety checkpoints,” and so on), or anything else. Now ask yourself the uncomfortable question: If it’s wrong for cops to do these things, doesn’t that imply that the people have a right to RESIST such actions? Of course, state mercenaries don’t take kindly to being resisted, even non-violently.

If you question their right to detain you, interrogate you, search you, invade your home, and so on, you are very likely to be tasered, physically assaulted, kidnapped, put in a cage, or shot. If a cop decides to treat you like livestock, whether he does it “legally” or not, you will usually have only two options: submit, or kill the cop. You can’t resist a cop “just a little” and get away with it. He will always call in more of his fellow gang members, until you are subdued or dead.Basic logic dictates that you either have an obligation to LET “law enforcers” have their way with you, or you have the right to STOP them from doing so, which will almost always require killing them.

Let's see, sexual assaults, thefts, riots and arrests, drug use and general squalor. Now talk of killing cops. No wonder the media has pretty much given up trying to compare the "Occupations" to Tea Party demonstrations. How many people were ever raped or arrested at a TP demonstration?

This sort of thing was predictable, though. People with legitimate grievances demonstrate for redress, but their protest, if it's dominated by liberals, inevitably gets hijacked by the far left and others who seek to exploit it to inflict chaos and anarchy.

We might anticipate that the extremists at the occupations will try to instigate more ugly confrontations with police to goad them into an over-reaction. The occupations will either break up with the cold weather or they'll become increasingly violent. The status quo is never an option for the left.

More Schiff

Last Wednesday we featured a short video of Peter Schiff engaging some of the Wall Street Protestors in dialogue. Here's the extended version of that encounter:

It's interesting to me that the protestors are camped out in New York City and other major cities around the country. Given their concerns, concerns many of us share to one degree or another, I don't know why they're not on the mall in Washington, D.C. or occupying the campuses of several major universities which have raised their costs far in excess of anything justified by inflation. In fact, to listen to some of these folks, I don't know why they're not marching with the Tea Party.

Anyway, it's too bad a fruitful, reasonable dialogue like this degenerates at one point into name-calling and insults, but that's what you get from some people, I suppose.

The Coming Collapse of Islam?

The other day we did a post on the anticipated global population crash which is projected to occur from about 2050 to 2200. Now Denyse O'Leary has reviewed a book by David Goldman titled How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too) in which Goldman argues that the Islamic world is not immune from demographic collapse and that, in fact, the prospects of decline may be even more severe for Muslim populations:

Islam is dying because the Muslim birth rate - according to reliable statistics - has crashed. How badly?

Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts.

Whatever they believe about Islam, they have one or two children, but rarely three or four. Not enough to deliver their societies from demographic collapse, given the size of the families they came from. For example,

The average young Tunisian woman - like her Iranian or Turkish counterpart - grew up in a family of seven children, but will bear only one or two herself.

Education for women doesn’t in itself cause birth dearth, but abandonment of the land does. Muslims are not immune from the urbanization that turns children who were once a source of wealth into a major cost centre. Increasing numbers of people, there as here, hope that others will undertake the trouble [of producing the next generation of children].

But surely some Muslims have large families? Those who do live in areas that are considered backward, and they cannot indefinitely prop up an unsustainably low urban birth rate. But because demographic decline happened so quickly in Muslim societies, the Western problem of too few young people supporting too many seniors will be much more severe, especially in countries with few natural resources, like Turkey.

A cratering population has serious implications for global terrorism according to Goldman:

“If we are surprised by Muslim demographics, it is because we have not listened carefully enough to what Muslims themselves have been trying to tell us.” Islamism is more of a last stand for many than a resurgent force, hence the glamor of suicide. If all this is correct, demographic collapse will increase rather than decrease the risk of terrorism, because “there is no such thing as rational self-interest for people who believe they have nothing to lose.”

....a culture’s suicidal resistance often increases at precisely the point where a huge conflict is irretrievably lost. This was true of the South in the closing days of the Civil War, and of Germany and Japan in World War II, for example. Many won’t be trying to win, only to inflict damage on the victor.

Even so, Goldman observes that internal demographic collapse is a more serious threat to Muslim countries than Islamic terrorism is to the West. No civilization has ever survived a situation in which a small number of young adults must support a large number of elderly as well as raise and support their own children. This, it appears, is the condition the whole world will soon find itself in.

Secularism and Its Discontents (Pt. II)

Yesterday we talked a little bit about portions of a New Yorker column by atheist James Woods who reviews a book of essays which strive to put a smiley face on contemporary secularism, the assumptions of which have led many moderns to a sense of quiet despair.

Today we rejoin Woods as he follows the regrettable example of so many of his fellow atheists who seek to prove that God is irrelevant to morality by reciting the inventory of allegedly bad moral behavior found in the Bible:

The Bible contains several examples of God and Jesus appearing to sanction what seems arbitrary or cruel conduct: the command that Abraham kill his son, the tormenting of Job (a game instigated by Satan, who seems quite chummy with the Lord), Jesus’ casual slaughter of the Gadarene pigs.

He continues on in this vein for some while, seemingly oblivious to the fact that none of what he cites from the Bible is at all pertinent to the question whether God is necessary for there to be such a thing as moral obligation in the first place. God is still the only sufficient ground of moral duty even if the Bible were to completely misrepresent Him. The stories Woods recounts may bear on the reliability of Holy Writ, but that's a totally different matter than the issue of the existence of a transcendent moral authority and the necessity of such an authority for moral obligation.

Woods next cites favorably a contribution to the argument by Bruce Robbins:

An acutely intelligent piece by the literary theorist and scholar Bruce Robbins attacks, in a different way, the idea that secularism implies meaninglessness or, at best, second-rate meaning....Secularism must find and create its own values, and these might be quite varied—for instance, “helping children with their homework or cooking good meals,” or “men campaigning to protect doctors from murderous antiabortion activists or Jews campaigning against Israeli settlements on the West Bank.”

This doesn't help either. What neither Robbins nor Woods seems to recognize is that these "values" are purely arbitrary. In a godless world, there is nothing to make these values right and contrary values wrong. What reason could we have, if we are just material beings - a "pack of neurons", as Francis Crick put it - with no hope of any accountability beyond the grave, what reason is there for not living solely for ourselves? What could possibly make the life of an arrant egoist morally wrong? It may differ from the life Mr. Robbins would live, but why should we esteem his life as the universal standard?

To press the point, if there is no God why would an Ernest Hemingway be wrong when he opines that "what's good is what you feel good after and what's bad is what you feel bad after"?

Philosopher Charles Taylor agrees with Robbins, however, and vigorously denies that our moral values are simply subjective and arbitrary preferences. He writes that:

It doesn’t follow ... that our attributions of value are merely arbitrary. We can argue about them rationally, and some of them can be said to be “strong evaluations” of an objective state of affairs. By a “strong evaluation,” Taylor means a judgment so powerful and wide that, when someone else is incapable of sharing it, this suggests some limitation or inadequacy on his or her part. When our neighbor doesn’t agree with us that murdering scores of people at an island camp in Norway is wrong, we do not shrug and say, “Chacun ses goûts”[ Each his own]. When Tolstoy calls Shakespeare a poor writer, it is a judgment that judges Tolstoy, and marks his eccentricity.

Unfortunately for Woods' thesis, Taylor's assertions do nothing to support the claim that morality is something other than an arbitrary convention - "an illusion", as philosopher Michael Ruse asserts, "fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." Taylor's words distill to the claim that moral right and wrong are whatever the majority feels strongly about, but that's hardly convincing support for his belief that morals in a godless world aren't subjective and arbitrary. Indeed, it seems to lend support to the belief that they are.

In any event, Woods closes on a bit of a downer:

Thirty years ago, Thomas Nagel wrote a shrewd essay entitled “The Absurd,” in which he argued that, just as we can “step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.” Secularism can seem as meaningless as religion when such doubt strikes. Nagel went on to conclude, calmly, that we shouldn’t worry too much, because if, under the eye of eternity, nothing matters “then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.” This is impeccably logical, and impishly offers a kind of secular deconstruction of secularism, but it is fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

If nothing matters then it doesn't matter that nothing matters. So says Nagel. It seems to me, though, that any view of life that leads to the conclusion that nothing matters really should be resisted with all one's strength, and all the alternatives, especially those, like Christianity, which affirm that everything matters, should be given every chance to demonstrate their superiority and not just dismissed a priori.

Jesus Diaz

There are those on the left who sincerely dislike this country, but it's hard to find similar sentiment expressed on the right. At least it has been hard until now, but I suspect stories like this one might change that. It's hard to watch this and not think that our government is comprised of people who are either incredibly stupid or insidiously evil.

Perhaps there's more to this story than what we're being told, but unless that's so, and I have seen nothing yet to indicate that it is, it's hard to disagree with anything Beck says toward the end of this interview. I wish he would've mentioned the name of the judge and emphasized the name of the prosecutor. These people are an embarrassment and deserve public obloquy. They certainly make me embarrassed for my country.

Go here for more on this interview.

Secularism and its Discontents (Pt. I)

Writer James Woods gives voice, in an interesting essay in the New Yorker, to the haunting sense of loss which grips many people in our secular age:

I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?” In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts. We are locked into our rival certainties—religiosity on one side, secularism on the other—and to confess to weakness on this order is like a registered Democrat wondering if she is really a Republican, or vice versa.

These are good questions Woods' friend asks herself in the dead of the night. George Levine sets out to answer them in a book he's edited and titled, perhaps improbably, The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now.

According to Woods, "Levine explains that the book’s aim is to explore the idea that secularism is a positive, not a negative, condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised."

It's very hard to see this as anything more than whistling past the graveyard. Thinkers like Richard Dawkins are closer to the truth, I think, when they insist that: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."

But it's not just Dawkins who concludes that life is meaningless and that there's no purpose to the universe. Similar thoughts have been expressed by dozens of atheistic scientists, philosophers, novelists, and others who have reflected on the human predicament throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

Consider this passage from Nobel-winning scientist Steven Weinberg: "[T]he worldview of science is rather chilling. [We find no] point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature...[W]e live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair."

Or this from Somerset Maugham: "If death ends all ... I must ask myself what am I here for....Now the answer is plain but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life and [thus] life has no meaning."

Woods goes on to talk about how one of the contributors to Levine's book handles the problem of trying to ground ethics in a godless world:

Many people, for instance, believe that morality is a deliverance of God, and that without God there is no morality—that in a secular world “everything is permitted.” You can hear this on Fox News; it is behind the drive to have the Ten Commandments displayed in courtrooms. But philosophers like Philip Kitcher remember what Socrates tells Euthyphro, who supposed that the good could be defined by what the gods had willed: if what the gods will is based on some other criterion of goodness, divine will isn’t what makes something good; but if goodness is simply determined by divine will there’s no way for us to assess that judgment.

In other words, if you believe that God ordains morality—constitutes it through his will—you still have to decide where God gets morality from. If you are inclined to reply, “Well, God is goodness; He invents it,” you threaten to turn morality into God’s plaything, and you deprive yourself of any capacity to judge that morality.

A couple things might be said about this. First, even if Kitcher is correct that Socrates' argument in The Euthyphro makes morality either independent of God or the product of God's arbitrary will, at least if there is a God there is a ground of moral duty. If there is no God then it's not that morality still exists on its own, with no need of God to give it warrant, it's that there simply cannot be any moral obligation to do anything at all. In a world without God there's no objective right or wrong, there are just feelings about right and wrong.

Atheist philosopher Richard Rorty saw this clearly when he observed that for the secular man there's no answer to the question, "Why not be cruel?" and Jeffrey Dahmer took his atheistic assumptions to their logical conclusion when he asked, "If it all happens naturalistically, what's the need for God? Can't I set my own rules? Who owns me? I own myself."

Secondly, I doubt very much, as I argue here, that the dilemma Socrates poses to Euthyphro is as formidable as Kitcher makes it out to be. Moreover, what of it if morality is indeed God's "plaything"? Isn't the entire universe, if God created it, His plaything? I don't understand why a morality inscribed by God on human hearts would be a worse thing than no morality at all just because it flows from the nature of the God who created the cosmos.

More thoughts on Woods' article tomorrow.

Should We Make the Rich Poorer?

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein was interviewed recently on PBS in response to the news that income inequality has grown over the last few years. Epstein defends that inequality with arguments that are as cogent as they should be obvious.

Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS.

The left seems indifferent to the power of Epstein's deposition. They often seem to care only that some people have more of the world's goods than do others, and, since they believe that to be an unjust state of affairs, they demand that the rich have their excess taken from them and given to people who have little. Lincoln's caution that Epstein quotes is apposite, however. We can't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer, even though that's precisely what the left thinks can be, and should be, done.

I confess to being personally disgusted at the huge bonuses given to Wall Street financiers by their shareholders, but though I think it contemptibly ostentatious and offensive it neither harms others nor is it economically unsound. To legislate against it, as the left wishes to do, puts them in the awkward position of advocating the imposition of their moral vision upon others, which is the very thing they've adamantly argued for fifty years has no place in a free, democratic society.

HT:Hot Air

What's Worse Than Despicable?

Actor/comedian Orlando Jones tweeted the other day that "if liberals want respect they should kill Sarah Palin". Real knee slapper, that one. Substitute the name of the president for that of Sarah Palin and what do you think the reaction in the media would, and should, be?

Of course, since Jones is himself a liberal there's just silence in the media about his comment. It reminds me of when Alec Baldwin, on a late night talk show, called for people to go to the home of Henry Hyde and stone him to death, him and his family, and the audience cheered wildly.

"Despicable" just doesn't seem to be an adequate adjective to describe behavior like Jones, Baldwin, or his audience displayed, nor is it adequate to describe the pass they're given by the media.

The Big Question

Peter Schiff wades in among the 99% and poses the big question: What, exactly, is a fair share for the rich to pay in taxes? Unsurprisingly, the OWS folks don't seem to have given the matter much thought:

HT: HotAir

Whale Echolocation

This animated video depicts a sperm whale hunting prey, including a giant squid, by echolocation.

Until recently the consensus opinion among biologists was that whales evolved from land animals, but recent finds have made this view increasingly untenable. Not only is the window of available time for all the requisite changes to adapt a terrestrial creature to a marine environment very narrow, but the sheer number and scope of the changes strains credulity. Here are a few of the changes that would need to have occurred within the span of about 3-5 million years:

• Counter-current heat exchanger for intra-abdominal testes
• Ball vertebra
• Tail flukes and musculature
• Blubber for temperature insulation
• Ability to drink sea water (reorganization of kidney tissues)
• Fetus in breech position (for labor underwater)
• Nurse young underwater (modified mammae)
• Forelimbs transformed into flippers
• Reduction of hindlimbs
• Reduction/loss of pelvis and sacral vertebrae
• Reorganization of the musculature for the reproductive organs
• Hydrodynamic properties of the skin
• Special lung surfactants
• Novel muscle systems for the blowhole
• Modification of the teeth
• Modification of the eye for underwater vision
• Emergence and expansion of the mandibular fat pad with complex lipid distribution
• Reorganization of skull bones and musculature
• Modification of the ear bones
• Decoupling of esophagus and trachea
• Synthesis and metabolism of isovaleric acid (toxic to terrestrial mammals)
• Emergence of blowhole musculature and their neurological control

Here's another video, courtesy of Uncommon Descent, which highlights some of the problems with the consensus view:

Whale Evolution vs. The Actual Fossil Evidence from Philip Cunningham on Vimeo.

The problem of transitional forms remains a serious difficulty for any kind of "molecules to man" evolutionary hypothesis, as this article at Evolution News and Views illustrates. It may have happened that all forms of life on earth are descended from a single ancestral form, but it seems that the more we discover the less evidence there is for it.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Contrary to the doom and gloom of many analysts, British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph paints a fairly optimistic picture of the American near future. From his perch in England he writes that:

The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. The current account might even be in surplus.

The making of computers, electrical equipment, machinery, autos and other goods may shift back to the US from China.

Assumptions that the Great Republic must inevitably spiral into economic and strategic decline - so like the chatter of the late 1980s, when Japan was in vogue - will seem wildly off the mark by then.

What accounts for Evans-Pritchard's contrarian view? He explains that the biggest driver of an American renewal is abundant energy:

Telegraph readers already know about the "shale gas revolution" that has turned America into the world’s number one producer of natural gas, ahead of Russia. Less known is that the technology of hydraulic fracturing - breaking rocks with jets of water - will also bring a quantum leap in shale oil supply, mostly from the Bakken fields in North Dakota, Eagle Ford in Texas, and other reserves across the Mid-West.

"The US was the single largest contributor to global oil supply growth last year, with a net 395,000 barrels per day," said Francisco Blanch from Bank of America, comparing the Dakota fields to a new North Sea.

Total US shale output is "set to expand dramatically" as fresh sources come on stream, possibly reaching 5.5 million barrels per day by mid-decade. This is a tenfold rise since 2009.

The US already meets 72% of its own oil needs, up from around 50% a decade ago.

"The implications of this shift are very large for geopolitics, energy security, historical military alliances and economic activity. As US reliance on the Middle East continues to drop, Europe is turning more dependent and will likely become more exposed to rent-seeking behaviour from oligopolistic players," said Mr Blanch.

He also thinks that the Chinese economic success will ultimately prove unsustainable:

Meanwhile, the China-US seesaw is about to swing the other way. Offshoring is out, 're-inshoring' is the new fashion.

"Made in America, Again" - a report this month by Boston Consulting Group - said Chinese wage inflation running at 16% a year for a decade has closed much of the cost gap. China is no longer the "default location" for cheap plants supplying the US.

A "tipping point" is near in computers, electrical equipment, machinery, autos and motor parts, plastics and rubber, fabricated metals, and even furniture.

"A surprising amount of work that rushed to China over the past decade could soon start to come back," said BCG's Harold Sirkin.

The gap in "productivity-adjusted wages" will narrow from 22% of US levels in 2005 to 43% (61% for the US South) by 2015. Add in [China's] shipping costs, reliability woes, technology piracy, and the advantage shifts back to the US.

There's more on these positive indicators for the future at the link.

He concludes with this:

The switch in advantage to the US is relative. It does not imply a healthy US recovery. The global depression will grind on as much of the Western world tightens fiscal policy and slowly purges debt, and as China deflates its credit bubble.

Yet America retains a pack of trump cards, and not just in sixteen of the world’s top twenty universities.

It is almost the only economic power with a fertility rate above 2.0 - and therefore the ability to outgrow debt - in sharp contrast to the demographic decay awaiting Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

The 21st Century may be American after all, just like the last.

Evans-Pritchard doesn't mention it, but it's hard not to see that both of the drivers of this possible American resurgence are opposed by the Obama administration and the American left. Increased fossil fuel production and the attractiveness to business of the American south where right to work laws and non-union shops make business much more efficient and profitable than elsewhere in the country are both attributes that the left would reverse if they could.

If Evans-Pritchard is right the U.S. economy will resume it's global dominance within the next five years as long as it's not strangled in the crib by regulations and taxes imposed by politicians ideologically averse to American dominance in the world.

Population Implosion

In the 1960s people like Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich were predicting world wide starvation, war, and chaos before the turn of the century due to exploding global population. Largely because of technological advances in agricultural production it didn't happen.

Now demographers are forecasting that the world's population is likely to implode over the next two centuries and that this decline will make the world a very different place. Reuters has a fascinating story about this projected crash. You should read the whole piece, but here are some excerpts:

If the world follows the demographic habits of Europe -- and that's a big if -- by the year 2200 it could be home to a population of less than half its current level, living in housing built for almost three times that number.

With the global population estimated to pass 7 billion on October 31, many of policymakers' short-term worries revolve around providing resources for the additional 2-3 billion people expected to be born in the next half-century.

Numbers of this magnitude inevitably conjure up terrifying visions of shortage and chaos. But in fact improvements in food production and technology have allowed population growth to continue unimpeded and relatively smoothly, and the real potential nightmare is of a rapidly aging population, combined with collapsing birthrates in both rich and poor states.

Many demographers and long-term planners say the challenge for the next century will be less dealing with growing numbers of people and more managing the much larger population of aged and perhaps dependent people while finding new strategies to deliver prosperity, jobs and essential services.

The trend has already contributed to the current global financial crisis by driving up health and social care bills and perhaps also undermining productivity. But while politicians tie themselves in knots over short-term worries, experts say there is not enough discussion of longer-term demographic challenges.

If birthrates fall to the same level as those of Shanghai, at around 0.8 per couple, then by the early 22nd century population would be falling so fast that it would drop from the 9 billion expected to inhabit the planet by 2070 to under a billion by 2150, a span of only 80 years.

If birthrates were closer to the European Union average of 1.5 then population would fall below 5 billion around 2140 and 3 billion by 2200. In contrast, maintaining the current rate of 2.5 would see it top 15 billion by 2100.

If life expectancies also fall these rates of decline would all be accelerated. These really are startling statistics.

Declines like these would place extraordinary pressure on countries which try to provide care for their elderly. Such care is possible when the population distribution is pyramidal with lots of young workers supporting a relative few elderly, but should the pyramid be inverted, as the above projections suggest they may be, it's hard to see how it could be sustained.

By 2030, more than a third of the population in a number of Western states as well as some Asian economies, such as Japan and Korea, will be aged over 65.

Many developing states, most notably China with its one-child policy but also a growing number of other nations, will follow suit -- often without the financial resources to help pay for the cost of medical and nursing care.

"It's the seminal issue of our time," says Michael Hodin, executive director of the New York-based Global Coalition on Aging and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"The numbers are stunning. The exact projections vary but it doesn't really matter because they are all going in the same direction."

Currently, fertility is still high in many of the world's poorer countries and the aging nations can import workers from them to sustain their elderly populations but even this expediency, which poses significant dangers to the cultural survival of the importing nation, won't last. The pool of available labor in poorer countries is also expected to eventually diminish.

Exact predictions vary, but most projections suggest the global population will peak at around 9 billion around 2070 and then start to fall, perhaps very fast.

In other words, by the end of this century the world's population could be in a rapid descent which would make the world poorer, resources more scarce, and violence more prevalent.

Or not. Fertility rates could buck current trends and remain at 2.5 children per couple worldwide. The future, after all, is a difficult thing to predict. Just ask Paul Ehrlich.