Straw Man

Peter Wehner has a low view of the presidential rhetoric emanating from the White House. He's evidently insufficiently appreciative, for example, of Mr. Obama's undeniable skill at constructing straw men and his artful use of the ad hominem:

In his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama took another stab at summarizing the philosophy of the Republican Party. And this is the best Obama could do: “Their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

This is a silly and intentionally misleading statement — silly because it’s so transparently false and intentionally misleading because the president surely cannot believe his own rhetoric. The problem for Obama is it’s becoming a pattern. Earlier this year, he charged that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and children with Down syndrome to “fend for themselves.”

After that, he told us the GOP plan is ”dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.” Given his rhetorical trajectory, Obama will soon be insisting that Republicans favor reinstituting slavery at home and genocide abroad (or perhaps it’s favoring genocide at home and slavery abroad).

These are the kinds of things a politically desperate and intellectually bankrupt politician says. The president must believe he cannot win a debate on philosophy on the merits, so he instead employs the crudest caricatures he can.

The point is that there seems to be no limit, no check, on what Obama will say in order to demonize his opponents — or, to quote Obama’s own words, his “enemies.”

Now I think this is too harsh. Mr. Obama is a gentleman, a good husband and father. Such men are not demonizers. After all, it was Mr. Obama, wasn't it, who during the campaign repeatedly promised us "hope and change" from the tawdry politics of the past.

It was Mr. Obama, Wehner admits, who in an interview once declared, ”I want us to rediscover our bonds to each other and to get out of this constant petty bickering that's come to characterize our politics.” Does that sound like the sort of thing we'd expect from a man who would demonize his opponents?

Moreover, even Mr. Wehner acknowledges that it was Mr. Obama who during the campaign proclaimed that "We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism… [...] That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, ’not this time….’” And it was Mr. Obama who said on the night of his election, on a stage in Grant Park, ”I will listen to you, especially when we disagree… [...] Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for too long.”

Those sound to me like the words of a high-minded intellectual, a man too noble to be grubbing about in the political gutters. Mr. Wehner should apologize for thinking that Mr. Obama is just a typical political opportunist and moral pragmatist who says whatever he needs to say to discredit his opposition in the eyes of the voters.

Indeed, he should be ashamed for even thinking such a thing about the leader of the free world. Read his column and see if you don't agree.

Fast and Furious Scandal

For those who need to get caught up the Fast and Furious operation was an ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) scheme to secretly encourage American gun dealers to sell guns to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels. They hoped to be able to track these guns to the top thugs in the cartels, but they lost track of thousands of weapons which fell into the hands of Mexican killers. Many were used in hundreds of violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The operation was a violation of both Mexican and American law.

Sharyl Attkisson of CBS has been almost alone among reporters in investigating this scandal and is now reporting that emails have been uncovered which show that the Justice Department, or at least the ATF, wanted to use the proliferation of weapons, which they caused and abetted, as a reason for imposing stricter gun controls on American dealers:

ATF officials didn't intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called "Demand Letter 3". That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or "long guns." Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF's Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

"Bill - can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks."

In other words, the ATF would pour weapons into Mexico and then when these weapons started turning up at crime scenes they would use their proliferation and use in homicides as a justification for stricter regulations on the very gun dealers they encouraged to sell the weapons in the first place.

And then we wonder why people don't trust their government.

BO and TR

President Obama has in the past invoked the memory a number of former presidents to set Americans at ease over his plans to "transform America." Lincoln, Reagan, FDR, Truman, even George W. Bush (although never Jimmy Carter with whom he's most comparable) have all been trotted out as examples to reassure us that the path toward crony socialism Mr. Obama has set us upon is really nothing radical.

Most recently he traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas to summon the shade of Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps the first of the progressive presidents, to validate his march toward an all-encompassing role for government bureaucrats in the lives of Americans.

National Review's editors mark the occasion with a fine "compare and contrast" of Mr. Obama and TR, and though they're no fans of either, they give us a fine skewering of the pretensions of a man of Mr. Obama's modest accomplishments seeking to clothe himself in the mantle of Teddy Roosevelt.

It is strange that Pres. Barack Obama has chosen to channel the spirit of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, the president he least resembles. Teddy Roosevelt was a rough-riding, safari-loving, war-adoring imperialist (ask the Panamanians), the man who sent the “Great White Fleet” on a round-the-world tour to make it clear to American rivals hither and yon that they had better mind their own business or face the wrath of a budding world power. Barack Obama was an undistinguished law professor and legislative back-bencher who once gave a very good speech.

Roosevelt wrote 18 books on subjects ranging from naval warfare to naturalism, and not one soft-focus psychological self-examination about his tender feelings about his estranged father. Like President Obama, President Roosevelt was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Unlike President Obama, he earned it, having successfully negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese War.

Not exactly mirror images.

And yet Barack Obama, the great indoorsman and man of inaction, whose only instinct when faced with a national crisis is to deliver yet another speech, has trundled himself down to Osawatomie, Kan., where TR, by that point an ex-president, made his famous “New Nationalism” address, to try to get a little of that Bull Moose magic to rub off on himself.

Color us skeptical, but we can see why TR’s New Nationalism might appeal to Barack Obama: It was an early instantiation of what our National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg has called, after H. G. Wells, “liberal fascism,” the central-planning, top-down, intrusively managerial approach to national government that has been the Left’s model for generations.

The editors go on to give us an incisive evaluation of Mr. Obama's speech at Osawatomie. It's worth reading. Here's a snippet:

President Obama’s speech, like President Roosevelt’s, was economically illiterate. Like TR, he juxtaposed the tycoons and the middle class, and committed the classic blunder of conflating the success of the former with the difficulties of the latter. The Democrat carried into office on a wave of Wall Street money called for a crackdown on Wall Street shenanigans even as he packs his administration with Wall Street veterans, while the Washington establishment’s perverse relations with Wall Street, and, especially, with the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, mighty contributors to the housing bubble, go unchallenged. It’s only greed when somebody else is making the money.

The NR editors conclude by noting that Mr. Obama's theme for the coming campaign appears to be "inequality", but, as the writers observe, Americans are not suffering from inequality. They're suffering from unemployment which, if the hundreds of thousands of people who have given up looking for work are taken into account, is pushing 11%.

Mr. Obama will try to blame the rich for this very troublesome state of affairs, but it's hard to see how it's their fault. On the other hand, it's easy to see how a bloated regulatory state which, with every new tax and regulation it imposes on business diminishes the incentive of employers to hire new employees, is a major contributor to the problem.

Back to the Drawing Board

Evolution News and Views has an interesting report of research on the metal zirconium that suggests that oxygen levels in the earth's early atmosphere were similar to what they are today.

This is interesting because pretty much every naturalistic theory of abiogenesis (the creation of life from non-living matter on the early earth) requires that oxygen be absent from the atmosphere since oxygen destroys organic compounds that are exposed to it for any length of time. That's why nutritionists encourage us to consume plenty of anti-oxidants. If life emerged through purely natural processes the first organic molecules could not have been exposed to oxygen.

Here's an excerpt from the ENV piece:

If the atmosphere has oxygen (or other oxidants) in it, then it is an oxidizing atmosphere. If the atmosphere lacks oxygen, then it is either inert or a reducing atmosphere. Think of a metal that has been left outside, maybe a piece of iron. That metal will eventually rust. Rusting is the result of the metal being oxidized. With organic reactions, such as the ones that produce amino acids, it is very important that no oxygen be present, or it will quench the reaction.

Scientists, therefore, concluded that the early earth must have been a reducing environment when life first formed (or the building blocks of life first formed) because that was the best environment for producing amino acids. The atmosphere eventually accumulated oxygen, but life did not form in an oxidative environment.

So, if measurements are accurate which show high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere from almost the very birth of the planet, then we're left with two explanations for abiogenesis: either the first life originated elsewhere and migrated to earth or it didn't originate as a result of natural processes alone, but received some impetus from an intelligent source.

No doubt the finding reported in ENV will give new energy to theories that life originated elsewhere and hitched a ride to earth in asteroids. Any physicalist hypothesis, no matter how unlikely, no matter how untestable, is preferable among modern thinkers to the hypothesis that there's a Mind behind the origin of life.

The irony is that almost every contemporary discovery about biology and cosmology supports the latter and makes the former more difficult to believe.

Western Vagrant

Last month a vagrant from the western states showed up here in central Pennsylvania. There have only been a half dozen or so records of this bird appearing in PA over the years so it was a treat to be able to see one this far east. The little fellow is called a Green-tailed Towhee and it likes to scratch about on the ground in brushy areas, a habit which makes them hard to see. To catch a glimpse of this guy I stood out in a drizzle for two hours waiting for him to pop into view. It was worth it.

The bird is in winter plumage, but there's still a hint of reddish-brown cap and a little greenish-yellow in the wings and tail. Ed Norman took the photo (the date on the pic is incorrect).

Regulatory Reform

David Brooks comes to the defense of President Obama against critics who charge that the Obama tenure has imposed onerous regulations on business that are stifling hiring and dampening the economic recovery. Brooks seems to want to argue that this is not so, but he winds up arguing that, well, it actually is so, but that other administrations, including that of George W. Bush, were almost as bad. This is hardly the sort of defense Mr. Obama might have hoped for.

The question, though, is not which administration laid the costliest burden on business but rather which administration is going to alleviate that burden in order to stimulate businesses to resume hiring. When the question is put that way, the only possible answer is that it's either the Obama administration, a successor administration, or nobody.

If Mr. Obama is serious about creating jobs he could do worse than follow the advice given in an article at City Journal. Iain Murray, a vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and David Schoenbrod argue that reforming the regulations imposed on business would create thousands of jobs almost immediately:

Since 1996 the number of pages of regulations heaped upon our entrepreneurs has exploded from 67,000 to 81,405.

Each page (apart from the bizarre blank ones) contains a rule that imposes costs on businesses while creating more jobs for bureaucrats. Small businesses suffer disproportionately from these rules because their owners have to deal with compliance themselves (they usually give up and hire someone else to handle it when they reach about 30 employees). The costs of complying with regulations average $10,585 per employee, the SBA says — enough to throw a small firm of 20 employees with $200,000 in profits into just-breaking-even territory.

No wonder small businesses, the engine of the U.S. economy, have stalled in hiring.

Chamber of Commerce surveys show that over 60 percent of small businesses have no plans to hire in the next year, and the firms cite greater regulation or the threat of it as a major reason for their reluctance. In short, bureaucracy helps explain why businesses are making profits but not jobs. Substantially reducing the regulatory burden would go some way toward getting them to hire again.

Unfortunately, regulations are the raison d'etre of big government bureaucrats. A party philosophically infatuated with the idea of government as the guarantor of social and environmental justice, as is the Democrat party, will be loath to reduce this burden. It's simply not in a liberal's DNA. If, however, they were to act counter to their nature and actually agree to reform measures what might some of those measures look like? Here are some ideas from the City Journal piece:

For starters, Congress should appoint an annual bipartisan commission to comb through existing rules and identify those that need repeal. The commission would conduct its own analyses of the costs and benefits of regulations, as federal agencies’ figures are notoriously suspect and far from independent. Congress would then vote on the entire repeal package, which would prevent legislators from trading their votes for the preservation of their preferred rules.

Further, Congress should add a five-year sunset provision to all new regulations. If it later decides that rules are worth keeping, it can vote to extend them for another five years. Congress should also revitalize the concept of “enterprise zones,” areas where businesses are exempted from some regulations to allow them to establish themselves at reduced cost. Enterprise zones proved an effective way of getting local economies moving in the 1980s and 1990s.

Another useful tool would be a new small-business license for all start-ups and microbusinesses — firms with five or fewer employees — exempting them from new regulations for a five-year period. The federal government might consider, too, devolving many regulatory duties to the states, letting the nation’s basic constitutional units discover the effectiveness of rules through trial, error, and interstate competition.

Two British policies invite imitation in the United States. Congress could experiment with “regulatory budgeting,” a system currently being introduced in the United Kingdom, by approving a proposal of Democratic senator Mark Warner’s: for every new rule introduced, an old one of equivalent cost would have to be repealed.

Congress could also implement an American version of Britain’s new Red Tape Challenge, which enables citizens to air grievances about particular regulations. This could be done either in conjunction with the bipartisan commission or, as in the U.K., by a team of business leaders that reports back to the legislature.

All these ideas would provide significant regulatory relief. First, however, Congress should take responsibility for regulations, instead of surrendering rule-making to unaccountable government agencies.

These all seem like fine proposals, but in order to enact them voters have to elect to office people who are genuinely sympathetic to the plight of the small businessman. As it is, our political class, or at least those on left, treats small businessmen as if they were public enemies and makes it exceedingly hard for them to take on new hires while simultaneously turning a profit. Perhaps that will change next November.

Trouble Ahead

Pat Buchanan must feel like one of those Old Testament prophets warning of impending doom while the people, oblivious to the coming storm, party on. Buchanan keeps churning out data in his columns and books that paint a depressing picture of America's future, but few seem to pay him any heed. If, as experts insist, demography is destiny, our destiny as a nation looks pretty bleak.

In a recent column Buchanan urges us to consider what the U.S. will be like in less than forty years:

Perhaps the year 2050 will see an America as united as the America of Dwight Eisenhower and JFK. Yet there are reasons to worry.

First, the great American Melting Pot has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a multiculturalism that is failing in Europe.

Second, what we are attempting has no precedent in human history. We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.

We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.

What, then, will hold us together? A Constitution over whose meaning we have fought for 50 years?

Consider the contrasts between the old and new immigration. Where the total of immigrants in the “Great Wave” from 1890 to 1920 numbered 15 to 20 million, today there are 40 million here.

In 1924, the United States declared a timeout on all immigration. But for almost half a century since 1965, there has been no timeout. One to 2 million more immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year.

Where the old immigrants all came from Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has never had the same success in assimilating peoples of color.

The Indians we fought for centuries live on reservations. And if we did not succeed with a few million Native Americans, what makes us think we will succeed in assimilating 135 million Hispanics who will be here in 2050?

We have encountered immense difficulty, including a civil war, to bring black Americans, who have been here longer than any immigrant group, into full participation in our society.

This was a failing that the last two generations have invested immense effort and enormous wealth to correct. But we cannot deny the difficulty of the problem when, 50 years after the civil rights revolution, one yet hears daily the accusation of “racist!” on our TV channels and in our political discourse.

Ought we not first solve the problem of fully integrating people of color, before bringing in tens of millions more?

Another factor is faith. After several generations, Catholics and Jews melded with the Protestant majority. But Muslims come from a civilization that has never accepted Christian equality.

The world’s largest religion now, with 1.5 billion believers, Islam is growing in numbers, strength and militancy, even as Muslim fanatics engage in eradicating Christianity from Nigeria to Ethiopia to Sudan to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan.

Is it wise to bring millions more into our country at such a time? Will that advance national unity and social peace? Has it done so in the Turkish enclaves of Berlin, the banlieues of Paris, Londonistan or Moscow?

There's much more at the link and very much more in his new book Suicide of a Superpower. Meanwhile, Republicrats party on as if it were all someone else's problem. Their insoucience reminds me of a story in Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah where Bork recounts watching the sordid spectacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings on television and going to a friend's office to lament that "Television is showing the end of Western civilization in living color." His friend replied, facetiously, that "Of course, it's coming to an end, but don't worry. It takes a long time, and in the meantime it's possible to live well."

If Buchanan is right we have about forty years to live well.

The Fatuousness of Relativism

Denyse O'Leary passes on a story told by a Canadian high school philosophy teacher named Stephen Anderson. Anderson recounts what happened when he tried to show students what can happen to women in a culture with no tradition of treating women as human beings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Materialism and Near Death Experiences

Reductive materialism is the hypothesis that all of our mental events can in principle be explained by physical processes occurring in the material brain. The reductive materialist does not believe that we possess a distinct mind or soul, but are simply and exclusively made of matter. Mental events, in this view, arise from the chemistry and physics of matter much like heat and light arise from the combustion of wood.

Well, a reductive materialist neuroscientist named Eben Alexander had a Near Death Experience a couple of years ago and was so overwhelmed by what he "saw" that he consequently abandoned reductive materialism. It's a fascinating story, one which, if true, is nothing short of breath-taking. Alexander recounts his experience in an interview at a blog called Skeptiko. Here's part of it:

[O]ne thing that has emerged from my experience and from very rigorous analysis of that experience over several years, talking it over with others that I respect in neuroscience, and really trying to come up with an answer, is that consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.

And of course, that was a hard place for me to get, coming from being a card-toting reductive materialist over decades. It was very difficult to get to knowing that consciousness, that there’s a soul [in] us that is not dependent on the brain. As much as I know all the reductive materialist arguments against that, I think part of the problem is it’s like the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight. Reductive materialists are under the streetlight because that’s where they can see things.

But in fact, if you’re keys are lost out in the darkness, the techniques there are no good. It is only by letting go of that reductive materialism and opening up to what is a far more profound understanding of consciousness. This is where I think for me as a scientist, I look at quantum mechanics and I go into this in great detail in my book, is a huge part of the smoking gun. It shows us that there’s something going on there about consciousness that our primitive models don’t get. It’s far more profound than I ever realized before.

That’s where I’m coming from because my experience showed me very clearly that incredibly powerful consciousness far beyond what I’m trapped in here in the earthly realm begins to emerge as you get rid of that filtering mechanism of the brain. It is really astonishing. And that is what we need to explain. Thousands or millions of near-death experiencers have talked about this.

Read his description of what he experienced and draw your own conclusions. One of mine is that it's one thing for someone disposed to theism or a spirit world to report having encountered the sorts of phenomena they may have expected to encounter, but quite another when they're reported by a neuroscientist who, up until he had the experience, was an arrant materialist. That Alexander was not in any way disposed or prepared to experience what he experienced confers upon his narrative an extra measure of credibility.

Justice Without Justification

There's an outstanding essay by Colgate professor Robert Kraynak in the current edition of The New Atlantis. The article is titled Justice Without Foundations and in it Kraynak explores the attempts of two groups of modern thinkers to maintain a moral system based upon values like freedom, justice, autonomy, equality, and dignity while at the same time recognizing that, by rejecting Christianity, they have forfeited any possibility of providing an objective foundation for these values. They're simply subjective preferences that are invested with an aura of sanctity that has no rational justification.

The two groups Kraynak directs most of his attention toward are postmodern pragmatists, particularly Richard Rorty, and scientific materialists like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker.

He begins with these observations:

Every age has beliefs about the good life and about ultimate reality that seem normal at the time but are strange and inconsistent when viewed from a broader, more historical perspective. Our present age is no different — not only in the liberal democracies of the West, but also in the globalized world influenced by Western ideas. The strangeness of our day consists in a strong moral passion for the virtue of justice sitting alongside a loss of confidence in the very foundations for justice, and even an eagerness to undermine them.

People today display extreme moral sensitivity to injustices that they understand as violations of the equal rights and equal dignity of all persons — especially the rights of persons thought to be victims of discrimination and oppression. This sensitivity leads to demands for government policies on behalf of “social justice,” and for changing social customs to protect individuals and groups from insensitive words and actions.

But at the same time that people are asked to become more aware of injustices and indignities, the foundations that might justify such obligations are disappearing from philosophy, religion, science, and culture. In many cases, they are being actively undermined by the scholars and intellectuals who are the most vocal in protesting injustices. Among the leading intellectual currents shaping our culture are moral relativism and scientific materialism, especially Darwinism.

Neither supports very well the demands for moral sensitivity and social justice — understood today in terms of equal respect and equal rights. For the crucial requirement of human equality is a conception of human dignity, which views human beings as having a special moral status in the universe, and individuals as having unique moral worth entailing claims of justice.

What is so strange about our age is that demands for respecting human rights and human dignity are increasing even as the foundations for those demands are disappearing. In particular, beliefs in man as a creature made in the image of God, or an animal with a rational soul, are being replaced by a scientific materialism that undermines what is noble and special about man, and by doctrines of relativism that deny the objective morality required to undergird human dignity.

How do we account for the widening gap between metaphysics and morals today? How do we explain “justice without foundations” — a virtue that seems to exist like a table without legs, suspended in mid-air? What is holding up the central moral beliefs of our times?

These are all important questions, questions to which the modern atheist is ill-equipped to offer a cogent answer.

Kraynak goes on to talk about how atheistic thinkers like Rorty, Dennett, Pinker, et al. are forced by their naturalism to live their lives in what Francis Schaeffer described as a two story building. In the lower story naturalists live their lives as rational beings, but, when they want to make moral judgments, they have to leave reason behind and leap to the upper story where non-rationality reigns.

Rorty is an interesting case because he, at least, recognizes that this is precisely what he's doing and even refers to himself as a "free-loading atheist." I.e. he admits to living off the moral capital of Christianity while denying the God from which that capital flows. Kraynak writes:

The best place to begin the discussion of justice without foundations is with the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, the influential spokesman for “non-foundationalism.” As a professor at the University of Virginia and Stanford, he made a strong impression on students by telling them to stop philosophizing and to live pragmatically on behalf of social justice and human dignity.

His rejection of philosophy was ... elaborated on in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and other writings, describing the futility of reason to grasp the external world of nature, or to provide rational foundations for knowledge, both moral and metaphysical....

He further maintained that political values such as democracy, equal rights, and respect for others are non-foundational commitments that North Americans and Europeans have built into their social conventions. Hence, we do not need philosophy to teach us how to act politically, because the ideals are embedded in our language and traditions; all we need to do is to affirm them by human sympathy and active citizenship.

The problems with Rorty’s position have been noticed by many critics — none more astutely than Peter Lawler in Aliens in America (2002). In developing these criticisms, it is useful to examine a little-noticed 1983 essay of Rorty’s called “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism.” In that essay, Rorty honestly admits that his moral sensitivities are “postmodern” in the sense of being rationally groundless; yet he asserts that they are still legitimate as borrowings from Judeo-Christian notions of human dignity inherited from the past. With intentional irony, Rorty describes people like himself as “free-loading atheists.”

His justification [for "moral" behavior] is that he is part of a community of moral traditions inherited from Judaism and Christianity, which teaches us to care for a homeless person like the Good Samaritan would do.

Of course, if he had been born into a community that taught the virtues of ethnic cleansing and slavery then those traditions would be justified as well. For Rorty what's right is whatever your community teaches. Morality is simply a convention, like the rules of grammar. The rules could be different than they are, there's nothing really right or wrong about them, and if the relevant community wanted to change them, whatever they decide would then be the new norm.

There's much more to Kraynak's analysis at the link, and I urge anyone interested in the contemporary intellectual and philosophical climate to spend the time it takes to give it a thorough reading. It's important.

Specks and Logs

Jim Wallis of Sojourner's magazine gives us a good example of the Biblical aphorism about discerning specks in the eyes of others while being unable to spot the log in one's own eye. In a recent column on his blog Wallis complains that some Christians have been willing to dump their family values principles in order to embrace a candidate, Newt Gingrich, who has been divorced twice, married three times and had an adulterous affair while married to his second wife:

A piece by Michelle Goldberg in Newsweek chronicles some evangelical voters in Iowa trying desperately to contort their values in order to justify supporting Newt Gingrich. She quotes Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council as saying, "Under normal circumstances, Gingrich would have some real problems with the social-conservative community... But these aren’t normal circumstances."

In other words, this guy clearly doesn’t stand for our values but we are ready to jettison those in order to make sure our party wins the 2012 election. Newt Gingrich’s three marriages – serving his first wife divorce papers while she was suffering from cancer, and cheating on his second wife while leading the impeachment battle against Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual sins – would normally be disqualifiers for family values conservatives.

Set aside the fact that Wallis repeats a slander here, the story about Gingrich serving divorce papers to a dying wife, which by now most informed people know is apocryphal.

What's really astonishing about this piece is that Jim Wallis, who calls himself a pro-life pacifist who esteems marital fidelity, would, if given the choice between Democrats like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and almost any Republican, vote for either of those Democrats. Yet Clinton had multiple affairs, was accused of sexual harassment and even sexual assault. He vetoed legislation that would have outlawed partial birth abortion and launched a war in Bosnia.

Barack Obama twice voted in Illinois against legislation that would have protected newborn babies from being intentionally allowed by medical staff to die, has killed numerous terrorists with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and launched a war in Libya.

And now Wallis chides other Christians for failing to put their principles above politics?

What am I missing?

Anesthesia and Consciousness

Anyone who has ever undergone a surgical procedure in which they were "put under" by an anesthesiologist may have marveled at how a chemical cocktail injected into the arm or inhaled through a mask can so completely disengage one's consciousness that even profound insult to the body fails to trigger the sensation of pain.

An article at New Scientist offers an interesting glimpse into research which attempts figure out exactly what anesthetics do, how they do it, and exactly what goes on in the brain that causes consciousness to be extinguished by them:

The development of general anesthesia has transformed surgery from a horrific ordeal into a gentle slumber. It is one of the commonest medical procedures in the world, yet we still don't know how the drugs work. Perhaps this isn't surprising: we still don't understand consciousness, so how can we comprehend its disappearance?

That is starting to change, however, with the development of new techniques for imaging the brain or recording its electrical activity during anesthesia. "In the past five years there has been an explosion of studies, both in terms of consciousness, but also how anesthetics might interrupt consciousness and what they teach us about it," says George Mashour, an anesthetist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "We're at the dawn of a golden era."

Consciousness has long been one of the great mysteries of life, the universe and everything. It is something experienced by every one of us, yet we cannot even agree on how to define it. How does the small sac of jelly that is our brain take raw data about the world and transform it into the wondrous sensation of being alive? Even our increasingly sophisticated technology for peering inside the brain has, disappointingly, failed to reveal a structure that could be the seat of consciousness.

The article does a good job of summarizing how anesthesia research may give us deeper insight into the nexus between the brain and consciousness, but the mystery of exactly what consciousness is and how it is generated by the brain seems no closer to being solved today than it's ever been.

Two Very Different Black Men

Lloyd Marcus is a black man who, he confides, is the only politically conservative person in his family, a circumstance that is fraught with trials and frustrations. Marcus pens an essay in which he undertakes to help his siblings understand him by explaining to them the basic differences between conservatism and liberalism.

Here's his lede:

About 99.9% of my family are Democrats because Marcus family tradition taught us that the democrats are "for the little guy." Republicans are "rich white racists." Liberal media and the Democratic Party jointly support and promote this silly, simple lie, which still wins the Democrats 95% of the black vote.

Despite me, the eldest of his five children, being a black conservative Tea-Party Republican, my 84-year-old dad's negative view of Republicans remains steadfast. Dad tolerates my baffling political views because he loves me.

However, I would not be surprised if my family scheduled an intervention. A black van pulls up, a hood is thrown over my head, and I'm carted off to an undisclosed location. I am denied food, water, and bathroom privileges, and I am subjected to video of Obama speeches 24/7 until I break.

It occurred to me that my family, like many Americans, is probably clueless regarding the truth of what it means to be a liberal or a conservative. Ironically, the majority of my family live extremely responsible "conservative" lives. They go to work every day, serve their communities, attend church, and raise their kids. And yet, the liberal media has led them to believe that the term "conservative" equals evil white racist.

So I would like to offer my family and others a little "Conservatism 101." Let us begin with a parable.

The parable, as well as the rest of his column, can be found at the link. Meanwhile, since we're profiling prominent blacks in the media, let's take a look at one of MSNBC's latest hires. I don't intend this to be a comparison with Lloyd Marcus because there really is no comparison. The only reason for bringing this man up is that apparently MSNBC considers him a representative voice of the African-American left.

The man's name is Al Sharpton, and his past record as a political activist and agitator is quite out of phase with his current rhetoric. Presumably, it matters little to MSNBC, but Mr. Sharpton has one of the most odious personal histories of anyone in their lineup.

An account of Mr. Sharpton's sundry bigotries can be found here, but for those pressed for time this video gives an inkling of both the style and the liberalism of Mr. Sharpton.

Here's the transcript in case you had trouble understanding the audio:

“White folks was [sic] in caves while we [Africans] was building empires.... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”

Evidently calling people "homos" is not a disqualifier for employment at progressive cable stations like MSNBC. It would appear that at that network all that matters is that you detest conservatives. If you satisfy that all-important criterion then perhaps you're given a pass on everything else.

Feminism's Mixed Legacy

Dennis Prager writes a provocative essay on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Prager argues that the legacy of feminism is a mixed bag of good and bad, but on balance it's mostly bad.

He begins with this:

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's feminist magnum opus, "The Feminine Mystique," we can have a perspective on feminism that was largely unavailable heretofore. And that perspective doesn't make feminism look good. Yes, women have more opportunities to achieve career success; they are now members of most Jewish and Christian clergy; women's college sports teams are given huge amounts of money; and there are far more women in political positions of power. But the prices paid for these changes -- four in particular -- have been great, and they outweigh the gains for women, let alone for men and for society.

The rest of the piece is given to arguing that these four aspects of the feminist legacy have been devastating for society in general and women in particular. Here's his summation:

In sum, thanks to feminism, very many women slept with too many men for their own happiness; postponed marriage too long to find the right man to marry; are having hired hands do much of the raising of their children; and now find they are dating boy-men because manly men are so rare.

I encourage you to read his supporting arguments at the link. They're very interesting.

Three Differences

Part of the difficulty the average person encounters in trying to follow present day ideological debates is a confusion of labels. Lots of people don't like labels, of course, but the fact is they are extremely useful and very hard to avoid.

As an example of label confusion, consider that modern conservatives hold views which in the 19th century were considered liberal. Thus, conservatives today are sometimes referred to as classical liberals, which is certainly confusing.

On the other hand, modern liberals hold many views which in the 19th century were associated with socialism. Today these liberals/socialists are often referred to as progressives, which has a more innocuous ring to it, at least to the ear of many Americans.

This short video does a nice job of illustrating three basic differences between classical liberalism (i.e. modern conservatism) and modern progressivism. There are other differences besides these three, to be sure, but these are pretty fundamental:

Neuroscientists vs. the Philosophers

An article at Nature News takes up the disparate ways in which neuroscientists and philosophers think about the problem of Free Will.

Neuroscience has shown that prior to a conscious choice the relevant part of the brain shows excitation, as if the brain makes the decision seconds before we are aware of it. Some investigators conclude from this that the brain determines the decision which, say the philosophers, is a bit naive. After all, we would expect that the brain plays some role in the decision-making process, but evidence that it plays a role in the choice is not evidence that it determines the choice.

Even so, if it were to turn out from analyzing brain states that it were possible to completely predict the decision that's ultimately made that would indeed be powerful evidence for determinism. We are, however, very far from being able to do such a thing:

Imagine a situation (philosophers like to do this) in which researchers could always predict what someone would decide from their brain activity, before the subject became aware of their decision. "If that turned out to be true, that would be a threat to free will," says Mele. Still, even those who have perhaps prematurely proclaimed the death of free will agree that such results would have to be replicated on many different levels of decision-making. Pressing a button or playing a game is far removed from making a cup of tea, running for president or committing a crime.

Whatever the case, if libertarian free will is shown to be an illusion, as many scientists believe, the consequences will be severe, but not even these scientists can live consistently with the belief the future is already set and that their choices are already determined.

The practical effects of demolishing free will are hard to predict. Biological determinism doesn't hold up as a defense in law. Legal scholars aren't ready to ditch the principle of personal responsibility. "The law has to be based on the idea that people are responsible for their actions, except in exceptional circumstances," says Nicholas Mackintosh, director of a project on neuroscience and the law run by the Royal Society in London.

Even so, if free will is an illusion, it's one which is very hard to escape, even for those most conscious of its unreality: Haynes's research and its possible implications have certainly had an effect on how he thinks. He remembers being on a plane on his way to a conference and having an epiphany. "Suddenly I had this big vision about the whole deterministic universe, myself, my place in it and all these different points where we believe we're making decisions just reflecting some causal flow." But he couldn't maintain this image of a world without free will for long. "As soon as you start interpreting people's behaviours in your day-to-day life, it's virtually impossible to keep hold of," he says.

Fried, too, finds it impossible to keep determinism at the top of his mind. "I don't think about it every day. I certainly don't think about it when I operate on the human brain."

The whole article is worth reading for anyone interested in the contemporary interface between neuroscience and philosophy. The question of free will is not simply an ivory tower exercise. There are a number of consequences which follow if it turns out that determinism is true, none of them good.

If it is the case that our choices are determined by extrinsic causes like environment or our genes then there can be no such thing as a moral obligation since we can only be obligated to do what's possible to do. Nor would reward and punishment ever be deserved since no one is ultimately responsible for their choices. The categories of good and evil would cease to be meaningful as moral categories since without moral obligation there really is no morality. Human dignity, which is based on an ability to choose our path, would be difficult to maintain and for those who are theists it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that the pain and suffering in the world is ultimately authored by God.

Any one of these consequences would by itself be disastrous for civilization. Let's hope that those neuroscientists intent on proving that they don't really have the freedom to choose to believe their theories or to reject them, but are determined by factors beyond their control to believe whatever they believe, come to discover that that notion makes not only their science but all of life incoherent. It's no wonder that they can't live consistently with it.

Sophie Scholl

The other evening I watched what may have been the best movie I've seen in several years. The film is titled Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Released in 2006 it's not only based on a true story, but much of the crucial dialogue was taken from the reminiscences of people involved with Sophie as well as official transcripts of her interrogation and trial.

Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were devout Christians who were members of a resistance movement in Nazi Germany called the White Rose. They printed flyers which they then circulated among university students and others to attempt to counter the propaganda put out by the Nazi government.

The Scholls were caught, and the heart of the movie is the intense confrontation between Sophie and her Gestapo interrogator, Robert Mohr. Together with the final scene of her trial, every word of which was taken from transcripts, it is some of the most riveting dialogue you'll ever find in a movie. Both the acting and the cinematography are superb. The whole picture is shot in grays and browns except for Sophie's sweater which becomes an unspoken symbol of light and goodness in the otherwise drear, depressing world created by state atheism.

Julia Jentsch plays Sophie Scholl, Gerald Alexander Held plays Robert Mohr, and the trial judge, the insane Roland Friesler, is played by Andre Hennicke. All three are outstanding in these roles.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a film about courage, faith, and martyrdom in the face of demonic evil. It shows the German people of the early 1940s at both their best and their worst. I highly recommend it, especially to those who appreciate films like Schindler's List and The Lives of Others.

All About Nothing

New Scientist offers a brief explanation of how the universe could have popped into existence out of "nothing." Actually, what it is is a mathematical account of how such a counter-intuitive event might be explained. It's pretty interesting:

An accompanying article by Paul Davies gives much more detail. Here's an excerpt:

So the modern conception of the vacuum [i.e. "empty space"]is one of a seething ferment of quantum-field activity, with waves surging randomly this way and that. In quantum mechanics, waves also have characteristics of particles, so the quantum vacuum is often depicted as a sea of short-lived particles - photons for the electromagnetic field, gravitons for the gravitational field, and so on - popping out of nowhere and then disappearing again.

Wave or particle, what one gets is a picture of the vacuum that is reminiscent, in some respects, of the ether. It does not provide a special frame of rest against which bodies may be said to move, but it does fill all of space and have measurable physical properties such as energy density and pressure.

Evidently, according to scientists who study these things, there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is not completely empty. Very well, but I'm not sure how this explains the origin of the universe since before there was a universe there was no space and thus no vacuum out of which it could have arisen.

I suppose one might respond that our universe is actually only one of a multitude of universes embedded in a pre-existing space, like bubbles floating in the air, out of which our world arose. This, though, sounds more like metaphysical speculation than empirical science.

In any event, the universe is a very, very strange place.

Illegal Immigration (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted a column explaining why it's necessary to stop illegal immigration. Today's post offers some suggestions as to how to do that in a way I believe finds the best balance between justice and compassion.

The issue is contentious, to be sure, but I think the American people would be willing to accept a two-stage measure which looks something like this:

The first stage would guarantee that a border fence be completed where feasible and the entire border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking. Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy authority or commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed, but not until.

After certification, any subsequent plan for what to do with those already in the country illegally could be crafted to avoid the worst elements of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living. To that end, once the border is secure, I believe Congress would find public support for legislation that allows illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens would be required to apply for a government identification card, similar to the "green card." After a reasonable grace period anyone without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country illegally in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card.

2) No one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, or to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, Medicare, etc.

They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other private charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish. Whatever taxes the workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This would require amending the 14th amendment of the Constitution), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any criminal activity, past or future, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation, as would any serious infraction of the motor vehicle code.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of the INS.

This is just an outline, of course, and there are details to be worked out, but it's both simpler and fairer than mass deportation or amnesty. Those who have followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and illegals who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear.

The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants.

It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be the politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems a more simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem than most other plans that have been suggested.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as does amnesty as it is usually conceived. The "amnesty" is contingent upon first stopping the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, these conditions for being allowed to work in this country proved too onerous, if illegal immigrants concluded they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

Quantum Weirdness

From time to time we've mentioned how quantum physics presents a serious obstacle to those who want to argue that the universe and everything in it, including us, is merely a physical machine subject to the inexorable laws of Newtonian mechanics. We've speculated that, to the contrary, quantum mechanics suggests that the most fundamental characteristic of the universe may be mind and that matter and physicality may simply be illusions created by mind.

Be that as it may, whatever the ontological implications of the quantum world are it's agreed by all that it's a very strange place.

This PBS Nova video featuring Brian Greene takes the viewer on a jaunt through some of the more fascinating aspects of quantum weirdness. In it Greene discusses things like superposition - the property of very tiny particles to be in more than one place at a time; wave-particle duality - the paradoxical notion that everything is really both a wave and a particle simultaneously; the observer effect - the idea that the existence of things is in some way dependent upon their being observed, and quantum entanglement - the truly bizarre notion that an observation made of a particle here instantaneously effects particles on the other side of the universe.

The video is about 45 minutes long, but it's well-worth watching if you wish to gain a better familiarity with these phenomena. One thing to keep in mind is that though the video will help acquaint you with the phenomena, it probably won't help you understand them. Nobody really understands them.

Enjoy:

Watch The Fabric of the Cosmos: Quantum Leap on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.