Whatever Works

There is a view among ethicists known as Pragmatism which holds, roughly speaking, that whatever works is right. Many politicians, unless they're governed by some higher moral principle, are pragmatists who believe that if something, no matter how nefarious it might seem to some, helps them hold onto power then it's ethically right and proper.

This is why so many politicians feel no qualms about lying about both themselves and their opponents. In their eyes lying is morally justified if it results in electoral success.

President Obama has amassed a rather impressive record in this regard, churning out half-truths and untruths on an almost daily basis.

Karl Rove summarizes some recent examples of Mr. Obama's faltering commitment to honesty in a piece at the Wall Street Journal:

To get a sense of how comprehensive the president's assault on the truth has been, consider some of his false claims in recent speeches and ads.

One Obama spot says, "To pay for huge, new tax breaks for millionaires like him, Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class: $2,000 for a family with children."

That claim has been thoroughly discredited, including by PolitiFact Virginia and editorials in this newspaper. Mr. Romney, unlike the president, is committed to cutting taxes for everyone, including the middle class.

Another ad says, "As a corporate raider, [Mr. Romney] shipped jobs to China and Mexico." In response, the Washington Post editorialized, "On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue."

As recently as Sept. 17, Mr. Obama claimed in Ohio that Mr. Romney's "experience has been owning companies that were called 'pioneers' in the business of outsourcing jobs to countries like China." But that claim, too, is a fabrication.

There is more. An Obama ad aimed at northern Virginia women intones, "Mitt Romney opposes requiring coverage for contraception." In fact, Mr. Romney opposes the president's unprecedented assault on religious liberties—in this case, the federal government forcing religious institutions (like church-sponsored hospitals, schools and charities) to provide insurance coverage for contraception in violation of their fundamental moral values and, incidentally, the First Amendment.

Rove goes on to accuse the president of having trouble being forthright about his own record as well:

Mr. Obama said at a Univision Town Hall on Sept. 20 that his biggest failure "is we haven't gotten comprehensive immigration reform done." The president then did what is second nature to him: He pinned the blame on Republicans. The problem with this excuse is that the Democrats controlled Congress by huge margins in the first two years of his presidency — and Mr. Obama never introduced an immigration bill or even provided the framework for one.

In the same interview, Mr. Obama claimed that his Justice Department's botched "Fast and Furious" gunrunning program was "begun under the previous administration." This time it was ABC's Jake Tapper correcting the record, pointing out, "it was started in October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency."

The most troubling recent example of Mr. Obama's serial dishonesty is his administration's effort to deny that the attack on our consulate in Benghazi was a premeditated terrorist assault, as if the truth would somehow tarnish Mr. Obama's foreign-policy credentials.

Unfortunately, many voters only pay lip service to their alleged disdain for dishonesty among politicians. When given the chance to show the door to someone who has blatantly tried to deceive the electorate both about his opponent and about himself, they'll vote for him anyway as long as he's more charming than the other guy. They did it with President Clinton and, sadly, many of them will do it again with Mr. Obama.

It makes one wonder who is more dishonest, the politicians or the people who vote for them even as they profess their contempt for the lack of integrity among the political class. Maybe voters only despise dishonesty when it's the other party's guy who's engaging in it.

Why the President May be in Electoral Trouble

Although recent polls have been showing Mr. Obama maintaining a substantial lead over Mr. Romney in the race for the White House there are several reasons to be skeptical that Mr. Obama is enjoying the cushion the media has been claiming for him. Here are four:

• Support and/or enthusiasm is down in every subgroup that carried Obama to victory last time. Jews, businessmen, youth, even blacks and Hispanics are all less enthusiastic than in 2008. Those blacks and Hispanics who vote will undoubtedly vote overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama, but it doesn't appear that as many will vote this time around as last.
• Democratic registration is down sharply in most swing states. John Hinderaker at Powerline cites these numbers from Ohio and elsewhere:

  Voter registration in the Buckeye State is down by 490,000 people from four years ago. Of that reduction, 44 percent is in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.
  
  Ohio is not alone. An August study by the left-leaning think tank Third Way showed that the Democratic voter registration decline in eight key swing states outnumbered the Republican decline by a 10-to-one ratio. In Florida, Democratic registration is down 4.9 percent, in Iowa it's down 9.5 percent. And in New Hampshire, it’s down 19.7 percent.
  
  The Third Way study, which was conducted in August, indicates the Democrats’ drop in registered voters coincides with a gain in independent voters.

• Admittedly, this one is anecdotal but perhaps significant nonetheless: I've heard a lot of people say that they voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 but will not vote for him in 2012, but I've yet to hear someone say they voted for John McCain in 2008 but will vote for Barack Obama this year.
• Finally, almost every poll that shows President Obama ahead assumes that Democrats will turn out in the same proportion over Republicans as they did in 2008. Many pollsters survey respondents based on the 2008 numbers so if Democrat voters were 8% more numerous than Republicans in 2008 then pollsters ask 8% more Democrats than Republicans who they'll vote for this year.
  
  This, of course, results in higher percentages of voters who say they'll vote for Mr. Obama, but given the heavy GOP turnout in the 2010 election and the much higher voter enthusiasm among Republicans this year, it seems unrealistic to rely on the 2008 numbers for this year's electorate.

Obama Phones

One time-honored way to win elections, I guess, is to bribe people by just giving them stuff. They'll apparently love you for it. It certainly seems that that's what the president is thinking with his cell phone give-away:

I don't know whether the people who got "Obama phones" are all going to vote, but, well, heaven help us.

The Key to Happiness

Robert Emmons, writing at Big Questions, discerns the key to Happiness in the Queen of the Virtues - Gratitude.

In modern times gratitude has become untethered from its moral moorings and collectively, we are worse off because of this. When the Roman philosopher Cicero stated that gratitude was the queen of the virtues, he most assuredly did not mean that gratitude was merely a stepping-stone toward personal happiness. Gratitude is a morally complex disposition, and reducing this virtue to a technique or strategy to improve one’s mood is to do it an injustice.

Even restricting gratitude to an inner feeling is insufficient. In the history of ideas, gratitude is considered an action (returning a favor) that is not only virtuous in and of itself, but valuable to society. To reciprocate is the right thing to do. “There is no duty more indispensable that that of returning a kindness” wrote Cicero in a book whose title translates “On Duties.”

Cicero’s contemporary, Seneca, maintained that “He who receives a benefit with gratitude repays the first installment on his debt.” Neither believed that the emotion felt in a person returning a favor was particularly crucial. Conversely, across time, ingratitude has been treated as a serious vice, a greater vice than gratitude is a virtue. Ingratitude is the “essence of vileness,” wrote the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant while David Hume opined that ingratitude is “the most horrible and unnatural crime that a person is capable of committing.”

Emmons goes on to discuss the myriad benefits of a spirit of gratitude for both the individual and society:

To give a flavor of these research findings, dispositional gratitude has been found to be positively associated with qualities such as empathy, forgiveness, and the willingness to help others. For example, people who rated themselves as having a grateful disposition perceived themselves as having more prosocial characteristics, expressed by their empathetic behavior, and emotional support for friends within the last month.

When people report feeling grateful, thankful, and appreciative in studies of daily experience, they also feel more loving, forgiving, joyful, and enthusiastic. Notably, the family, friends, partners and others that surround them consistently report that people who practice gratitude are viewed as more helpful, more outgoing, more optimistic, and more trustworthy.

One of the most important passages in the essay, at least in my opinion, was when Emmons says this:

A spirit of ingratitude corrodes human relationships and becomes epidemic within a culture when entitlements and rights are prioritized over duties and obligations, laments Senior Fellow Roger Scruton of the American Enterprise Institute. Is it any wonder then, that the biggest fear that parents now have for their children is a sense of entitlement and the resentment produced when life fails to deliver what their children think they are entitled to?

When people come to see themselves as entitled their sense of gratitude withers. That's one of the corrosive effects of the modern welfare state - people feel they're owed something from others and consequently their sense of thankfulness is often attenuated. Moreover, when people are granted help from a nebulous, impersonal government it's much more difficult to be thankful for it than when it comes from concrete individual persons.

At any rate, I urge those readers who are searching for happiness in their lives to do a little introspection and ask themselves how grateful they are for what others do, and have done, for them. I also urge readers to read the rest of Emmons' article. There's a lot of wisdom in it.

What's the Most Likely Explanation?

Here's a five minute video showing just a few of the basic details of how a bacterial flagellum works and how it is constructed. Keep in mind that what you're watching is an animation that barely scratches the surface of the complexity of these microscopic organelles. Also keep in mind that the basic philosophical/scientific controversy today is over whether such structures - and the myriad of other structures in the cell - developed as a consequence of blind, impersonal forces and processes or, alternatively, whether they are the product of an intelligent, purposeful agent:

Suppose you were completely neutral on the question of what could have produced this. Suppose that you had no metaphysical inclinations either for or against theism or naturalism. Which of the two would you think to be the most likely explanation for such a structure? Would you think that such functional complexity is more or less likely to have arisen by chance mutations and natural selection or as a result of intelligent engineering by a mind?

Is Romney Really Ahead?

Political strategist Dick Morris explains why Romney is actually in a better position than Obama despite what both the pundits and the polls say. After a review of some of the problems that a number of the polls have he writes this:

Finally, with Obama below 50% of the vote in most swing states, he is hitting up against a glass ceiling in the high 40s. He can’t get past it except in heavily Democratic states like New York or California. The first time Obama breaks 50 will not be on Election Day. Either he consistently polls above 50% of the vote or he won’t ever get there in the actual vote.

So here’s where the race really stands today based on Rasmussen’s polling:

• Romney leads decisively in all states McCain carried (173 electoral votes).
• Romney is more than ten points ahead in Indiana – which Obama carried. (11 electoral votes).
• Romney leads Obama in the following states the president carried in 2008: Iowa (44-47) North Carolina (45-51), Colorado (45-47), and New Hampshire (45-48). He’ll probably win them all. (34 electoral votes).

This comes to 218 of the 270 Romney needs. But…

• Obama is below 50% of the vote in a handful of key swing states and leads Romney by razor thin margins in each one. All these states will go for Romney unless and until Obama can show polling support of 50% of the vote.
• Obama leads in Ohio (47-46) and Virginia (49-48) by only 1 point (31 electoral votes).
• Obama leads in Florida (48-460) and Nevada (47-45) by only 2 points (35 electoral votes).
If Romney carries Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, he wins. And other states are in play.
• Obama leads in Wisconsin (49-46) by only 3 points (10 electoral votes).
• Obama’s lead in Michigan is down to four points according to a recent statewide poll.
• Obama is only getting 51% of the vote in Pennsylvania and 53% in New Jersey. And don’t count out New Mexico.

It would be accurate to describe the race now as tied. But Romney has the edge because:

• The incumbent is under 50% in key states and nationally. He will probably lose any state where he is below 50% of the vote.
• The Republican enthusiasm and likelihood of voting is higher.
• The GOP field organization is better.

Perhaps this is all just a matter of putting the best face on things or perhaps Romney really is doing better than what we're hearing from the media.

David Brooks' Conservatism

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times who considers himself a conservative. Perhaps relative to his colleagues at the Times he is, but his conservatism is hard to discern in most of his columns. He recently wrote a piece in which he laments how, in his mind, one branch of conservatism in the Republican party, what might be called traditional values conservatism, has been squeezed out by economic, or free market, conservatism. He begins with this:

When I joined the staff of National Review as a lowly associate in 1984, the magazine, and the conservative movement itself, was a fusion of two different mentalities.

On the one side, there were the economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace.

But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

Because they were conservative, they tended to believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.

Perhaps Brooks thinks this sort of conservative is less familiar because he's not really looking for them. If he were he'd see exactly this sort of conservative in Paul Ryan and Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin. He'd see it in the leaders of most of the conservative grass roots organizations like the Tea Party.

What's happened, however, is that anyone who promotes "traditional values" conservatism is attacked by the liberal media and the message gets diffused as conservatives seek to defend a host of countercultural social positions.

Conservatives have implicitly decided, I think, that for the sake of defeating Barack Obama in November they will train all their fire on his economic failures and put the traditional social issues on the back-burner so as not to be side-tracked by interminable disputes over intractable questions.

Later in his column Brooks says this:

It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists. There are few people on the conservative side who’d be willing to raise taxes on the affluent to fund mobility programs for the working class. There are very few willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40 percent of American kids are born out of wedlock. There are very few Republicans who protest against a House Republican budget proposal that cuts domestic discretionary spending to absurdly low levels.

The results have been unfortunate. Since they no longer speak in the language of social order, Republicans have very little to offer the less educated half of this country. Republicans have very little to say to Hispanic voters, who often come from cultures that place high value on communal solidarity.

This is just silly. Brooks is faulting conservatives for not being liberals. The fact is that conservatives realized long ago that money is not the solution to the problems of the working class and chaotic neighborhoods. You don't change people's character by giving them money. Indeed, throwing money at problems only exacerbates those problems. Since LBJ's Great Society of the 1960s we have spent over six trillion dollars on the sorts of programs that Brooks talks about, and the problems of the poor as deep as ever.

What the denizens of those chaotic neighborhoods need is not more government programs. What they need is economic opportunity which is created by a powerful economy, they need to learn the importance of marriage, and they need strong father figures who can teach them the importance of moral character. None of that can be provided by government, it can only be provided by the mediating institutions of church and civic organizations. Nor is any of it likely to emerge in the cultural cesspool that is modern entertainment. It will only flourish in an environment where the culture promotes messages which reinforce the value of monogamous marriage and family.

I would think someone of Brooks' acumen would see this much more clearly than he evidently does.

Oil and the Economy

Jeff Rubin at Bloomberg.com has a very informative piece titled How High Oil Prices Will Permanently Cap Economic Growth. Here's his intro:

For most of the last century, cheap oil powered global economic growth. But in the last decade, the price of oil has quadrupled, and that shift will permanently shackle the growth potential of the world’s economies.

The countries guzzling the most oil are taking the biggest hits to potential economic growth. That’s sobering news for the U.S., which consumes almost a fifth of the oil used in the world every day. Not long ago, when oil was $20 a barrel, the U.S. was the locomotive of global economic growth; the federal government was running budget surpluses; the jobless rate at the beginning of the last decade was at a 40-year low. Now, growth is stalled, the deficit is more than $1 trillion and almost 13 million Americans are unemployed.

And the U.S. isn’t the only country getting squeezed. From Europe to Japan, governments are struggling to restore growth. But the economic remedies being used are doing more harm than good, based as they are on a fundamental belief that economic growth can return to its former strength. Central bankers and policy makers have failed to fully recognize the suffocating impact of $100-a-barrel oil.

Running huge budget deficits and keeping borrowing costs at record lows are only compounding current problems. These policies cannot be long-term substitutes for cheap oil because an economy can’t grow if it can no longer afford to burn the fuel on which it runs. The end of growth means governments will need to radically change how economies are managed. Fiscal and monetary policies need to be recalibrated to account for slower potential growth rates.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration drags its feet on issuing permits to drill for the ocean of oil we have resting beneath the continental shelf. No doubt this is because Mr. Obama wants to limit oil availability so that the price of it stays high so that we'll use less of it. He said as much when he was campaigning for office the first time around.

What this seems to ignore, however, is the effect on the poor and the middle class of high oil prices. As oil prices rise everything becomes more expensive. It becomes harder for those trying to provide for their families on tight budgets to make ends meet. The upper middle class have a bit of a cushion, perhaps, but the poor have none. Moreover, the upper middle class may forego eating out as often, or going to the movies, or buying a new car or home entertainment system, but what effect does that reluctance to spend have on single moms who are trying to feed their own families by waitressing or working behind the counter at Sheetz?

As gas prices go up everyone gets poorer, and for some it's calamitous. We could avoid this by increasing the supply. We could approve the Keystone pipeline and drill offshore, but we won't as long as Mr. Obama is in office. The policies of the man who wants to be seen as the champion of the poor do nothing but insure that there'll be plenty of poor. It's a puzzlement.

Anyway, read the rest of Rubin's article at the link. It's good.

Bumps in the Road

All I can say about President Obama's comment comparing the deaths of four Americans, including an ambassador, the razing of the Egyptian embassy, and sundry other insults to our sovereignty around the Arab world to mere "bumps in the road" is that it's a good thing it was Mr. Obama who said it and not Mitt Romney.

If it had been Romney who invoked this trivializing metaphor there'd be a firestorm in the media right now that no amount of backing and filling and apologizing could quench. As it is, though, the mainstream media has pretty much ignored it and contented themselves instead with assuming a posture of outrage over Mr. Romney's relatively benign assertion that the 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes aren't going to vote for someone who'll insist that that percentage be reduced.

I wonder if the Israelis are wondering right now whether Mr. Obama would look at a nuclear attack by Iran as just a "bump in the road" in our Middle East policy.

Are We Getting Smarter?

James Flynn writes in the Wall Street Journal about the steady rise in IQ over the last century and what's responsible for it. It's a fascinating article. Here's part of it:

IQ tests aren't perfect, but they can be useful. If a boy doing badly in class does really well on one, it is worth investigating whether he is being bullied at school or having problems at home. The tests also roughly predict who will succeed at college, though factors like motivation and self-control are at least as important.

Advanced nations like the U.S. have experienced massive IQ gains over time (a phenomenon that I first noted in a 1984 study and is now known as the "Flynn Effect").

In 1910, scored against today's norms, our ancestors would have had an average IQ of 70 (or 50 if we tested with Raven's). By comparison, our mean IQ today is 130 to 150, depending on the test. Are we geniuses or were they just dense?

These alternatives sparked a wave of skepticism about IQ. How could we claim that the tests were valid when they implied such nonsense? Our ancestors weren't dumb compared with us, of course. They had the same practical intelligence and ability to deal with the everyday world that we do. Where we differ from them is more fundamental: Rising IQ scores show how the modern world, particularly education, has changed the human mind itself and set us apart from our ancestors. They lived in a much simpler world, and most had no formal schooling beyond the sixth grade.

A century ago, people mostly used their minds to manipulate the concrete world for advantage. They wore what I call "utilitarian spectacles." Our minds now tend toward logical analysis of abstract symbols—what I call "scientific spectacles." Today we tend to classify things rather than to be obsessed with their differences. We take the hypothetical seriously and easily discern symbolic relationships.

Flynn offers several examples of the difference in the way people tended to think a century ago compared to how they think now:

The mind-set of the past can be seen in interviews between the great psychologist Alexander Luria and residents of rural Russia during the 1920s—people who, like ourselves in 1910, had little formal education.

Luria: What do a fish and crow have in common?
Reply: A fish it lives in water, a crow flies.
Luria: Could you use one word for them both?
Reply: If you called them "animals" that wouldn't be right. A fish isn't an animal, and a crow isn't either. A person can eat a fish but not a crow.

The prescientific person is fixated on differences between things that give them different uses. My father was born in 1885. If you asked him what dogs and rabbits had in common, he would have said, "You use dogs to hunt rabbits." Today a schoolboy would say, "They are both mammals." The latter is the right answer on an IQ test. Today we find it quite natural to classify the world as a prerequisite to understanding it.

Flynn offers more discussion in the article of the difference between our contemporaries and our forebears. Flynn maintains that our brains have evolved to make us smarter, but I think this is unlikely. Evolution doesn't occur with such rapidity. I think it's more probable that our world is so much different from the world of 1910 that our brains utilize abilities that have been latent in the brains of human beings for millenia but which few people before the present era would ever have had need to utilize. Anyway, the rest of the article is worth reading.

In the Absence of God

A friend writes to say:

Thanks for telling me about your book, In the Absence of God. I bought it last Tuesday for my Kindle and finished it in two evenings, although the last evening lasted until 3:05 a.m.. I could not put it down. Thought provoking, good story lines and characters, entertaining reading, and very educational. Absolutely loved the book and have been talking about it to my kids, family and friends.

Good job, my friend.

Reading In the Absence of God in two nights is impressive as the book is close to 500 pages. You can get your copy, and one for a friend, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds.

Replacement Refs

We've been listening for three weeks now to almost every NFL broadcast team and sportswriter complain endlessly about the awful job the NFL's replacement refs are doing officiating professional football games, and I for one am getting a bit weary of it.

Sure the replacement officials are struggling. Sure they're slowing down the game and making bad calls, although I remember a lot of complaints about the officiating abilities of the regular refs, too.

But what's the alternative? Do those who're complaining so loudly expect the NFL to give in to the locked out officials' demands? That won't happen. Do they expect the regular refs to meekly eat crow and accept the owners' last offer? I doubt that'll happen either. So, the only alternative is for everybody to just accept the fact that the game is going to be less skillfully officiated than it otherwise would be and just shut up about it.

After all, with all the criticism these replacement guys have been getting I wouldn't blame them if they just said they're not going to take it anymore and just quit. Then there'd be no football season at all. How happy would the coaches, players, and fans be then? All the people who've been telling the substitutes how bad they are, how incompetent they are, how much they "stink," would turn on a dime and start begging them to come back on the job. They'd be grovelling in front of these guys, offering abject apologies for the way they criticized them over the first three weeks of the season and pleading with them to return to the field so that the fans can get their weekly football fix and the players and television networks can get their exorbitant paychecks.

The desperation that'd suddenly beset all these people if the replacement refs chose to walk off the field would be fun to watch. It'd serve them right.

Abdication of Leadership

The Daily Beast is owned and operated by the same folks who run Newsweek magazine so there's a lot of sympathy there for President Obama. Which is why it was surprising to find there an article written by two Washington lawyers named David Rivkin and Lee Casey which excoriates Mr. Obama for what they claim is a disastrous foreign policy.

The Daily Beast summarizes their critique this way:

The organizing principle of the administration’s foreign policy is one of weakness and passivity, coupled with a conspicuous rhetorical abdication of American leadership, write David Rivkin and Lee Casey.

After elaborating on the failures that led to the recent assaults on our embassies in Muslim North Africa and elsewhere the authors add this:

But all of this flawed crisis management pales in comparison with the administration’s strategic failures. The organizing principle of the administration’s foreign policy is one of weakness and passivity — whether in dealing with Russia, China, or Venezuela — coupled with a conspicuous rhetorical abdication of American leadership, evident in speeches by the president, secretary of state, and other administration officials. The ultimate irony for an administration oft-praised for superior rhetoric is that in today’s tightly knit global environment, words have palpable consequences.

This overarching problem is accentuated by the fact that everybody in the Middle East — our friends, foes, and folks in between — has correctly concluded that the administration has begun America’s disengagement from the region on a scale unseen since the days of the British withdrawal from “East of Suez.”

This has manifested itself in virtually every facet of our Middle East policy, from our failure to maintain any American military presence in Iraq and the consequent loss of diplomatic and economic influence in Baghdad; to Washington’s unwillingness to rally the American public to support our military efforts in Afghanistan and its repeated snubs of our strongest traditional Middle East ally, Israel; to our leading from behind on Libya and the total failure to lead from any direction on Syria; and last but not least, to our timidity in confronting the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

As a result, the Middle East elites and the proverbial “Arab street” have concluded that the U.S. is a waning power, Israel’s future is one of a besieged state that someday may disappear from the regional chessboard, and Iran has an excellent chance of becoming a regional hegemon, to be feared and placated.

These are self-inflicted wounds. The American disengagement has not been caused by military defeat or some adverse international developments that we have tried but failed to stop, but by an administration that has profoundly misunderstood the kind of world we live in, the types of threats we confront, and what constitutes vital American interests. The administration has amassed not just a middling or even moderately bad foreign-policy record, but an appalling one.

It is this record that is shaping the way the governments in the Middle East are handling the anti-American unrest. Unless the record is decisively reversed, it will lead to many disastrous developments down the road.

Strong words, but when you consider that the last time an American embassy was overrun was 1979 in Tehran during the presidency of Jimmy Carter you get some perspective on how deeply our current policy toward the Arab world has failed. This incident was far worse than the Iranian hostage crisis because in that affair, which brought an end to Carter's presidency, no one was killed. It is the obvious and unfavorable comparison to 1979 that explains why the Obama administration refused to admit that these assaults on American territory and lives was planned in advance. If they admitted this they'd have to answer the question why we didn't know it was coming and if the answer is that we did have intelligence that such a terrorist attack was coming why weren't we prepared for it?

By every measure, this is a disaster for the Obama administration. Mr. Obama can no longer say that he has kept us safe from terrorist attack nor can he take refuge in the boast that Osama is dead. Osama may be dead, but so is our ambassador.

Despite the fact that this is such a calamitous event, despite the fact that it appears that president Obama's approach to the Islamic world is an abject failure, despite the fact that were a Republican in the White House we would be reminded several times a day by the media of the incompetence of the administration, our media has instead been obsessed with trying to divert our attention with silly stories about Romney writing off 47% of American voters.

Are we really as shallow and stupid as our media evidently thinks us to be?

Another Textbook Myth Falls

No doubt you once upon a time read something in your high school biology class like the following narrative excerpted from a widely used text by Miller and Levine:

Darwin noticed several types of small brown birds on the islands with beaks of different shapes. He thought that some were wrens, some were warblers, and some were blackbirds. ... the little brown birds that Darwin thought were wrens, warblers, and blackbirds were actually all species of finches! They, too, were found nowhere else, though they resembled a South American finch species ... Darwin was stunned by these discoveries. He began to wonder whether different Galápagos species might have evolved from South American ancestors.

He spent years filling notebooks with ideas about species and evolution. ... Once Darwin learned that the birds were all finches, he hypothesized that they had descended from a common ancestor. Darwin noted that several finch species have beaks of very different sizes and shapes. Each species uses its beak like a specialized tool to pick up and handle its food... Darwin proposed that natural selection had shaped the beaks of different bird populations as they became adapted to eat different foods.

It's a pretty story, but it turns out that, like so much else we were taught about evolution, it isn't true. According to a Harvard historian of science named Frank Sulloway, Darwin was almost indifferent to the birds he encountered on the Galapagos Islands. Sulloway is quoted by Alberto A. Martinez in his book Science Secrets: The Truth about Darwin's Finches, Einstein's Wife, and Other Myths. Martinez writes:

Many old books claim that when Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands, he was inspired to think about evolution by seeing variations in finches' beaks. ... Allegedly, he found that each species of finch belonged to a particular island and had developed distinct feeding habits that matched their evolving beaks, for cracking small or big seeds or for eating insects. That's what many people still think, and so, one of the most widely reproduced pictures in history is that of Darwin's finches.

However, in sterling historical studies, Frank J. Sulloway of Harvard University showed that, really, Darwin was hardly influenced by finches and scarcely observed their feeding habits.

He did not correlate their diets and beaks; in fact, Darwin collected too few specimens to determine whether any finch species was unique to each island. He did not even keep track of where he picked up every specimen. Really, no finch species was unique to any one island. Unfortunately, some teachers and writers remain unaware of Sulloway's historical findings.

There's more on this at Evolution News and Views. Like the Peppered moth story, the Recapitulation theory, Junk DNA, and so much else still found in textbooks even though they're obsolete and/or discredited, it persists for years in edition after edition because it makes for such a fascinating tale. After all, the claims don't have to be true, exactly, as long as they help students to understand the theory, or at least that seems to be the justification for continuing to teach these myths and falsehoods to our kids.

Yes, We Can't

Four years ago the rhetoric soared and the promises were intoxicating. The sick would be cared for, the oceans would reverse their rise, the planet would heal, and peace would fill the planet. It was the age of Aquarius. The millenial kingdom was at hand.

That was then. Now the president seems at almost every turn to be telling us that the economy was worse than he thought, the Republicans are more recalcitrant than he expected, the world is more complex than he knew. There are limits to what he can do. The change he promised us, well, it can't actually be effected from inside Washington.

It's hard to believe that a president whose party controlled both houses of the legislature for the first two years of his administration and who has been blessed with an obsequious media couldn't accomplish whatever he really wanted to accomplish. Nonetheless, "Yes we can" has in less than four years morphed into "No, I can't, but I deserve four more years anyway."

Mr. Obama's admission of failure reminds me of the man in a cynical limerick I heard a number of years ago that goes like this:

They showed him the thing

that couldn't be done,

and with a smile he got right

to it.

He tackled the thing that

couldn't be done,

and found out he couldn't do it.

The Magician's Twin

C.S. Lewis was a scholar of medieval classics and a writer of no little fame. He wrote the Narnia series and a number of other works, both fiction and non-fiction, which have been immensely popular with readers for over sixty years. One of his non-fiction works was titled The Abolition of Man, and in it he traces how modernity is inexorably extinguishing man's humanity. Lewis decries the dehumanizing scientism, the view that any question worth asking can be answered by science, which has come to dominate so many precincts in modern culture. Even so, his views on science and evolution have gone largely unexplored in the fifty years since his death (He died on the same day as John F. Kennedy).

Now there's a new book out on these aspects of Lewis' thinking titled The Magician's Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society and it's reviewed by Tom Bethell in the current issue of The American Spectator. The book takes its title from Lewis' claim that science and magic are in several respects twins.

Bethell writes:

We normally associate C.S. Lewis with Christian apologetics, English literature, and the Narnia stories; less so with science and questions about evolution. But as the Discovery Institute's John G. West points out in The Magician's Twin, throughout his life Lewis was concerned about the abject submission of culture and politics to the growing authority of science. Lewis respected science, but he rejected the idea that it is the only reliable method of knowledge about the world. He called that error scientism. As for evolution, his skepticism about it increased over the years.

In this anthology, John West and his co-authors gather material primarily from four books by Lewis: Miracles, The Abolition of Man, That Hideous Strength and The Discarded Image. Their findings are enhanced by West's research into Lewis's papers and correspondence, now at Wheaton College in Illinois. He also made good use of unpublished annotations and underlined passages in books preserved from Lewis's own library.

Lewis well understood the cultural dominance of the theory of evolution in his day and was at first reluctant to criticize the theory. He also tended to assume, as so many others have since, that Darwinism was better confirmed than it really was (or is). In fact, since Lewis's death in 1963, the new findings of molecular biology have made the theory look a good deal less plausible than it did 50 years ago.

Bethell goes on to outline some of the modern trends that Lewis could not have foreseen in their particulars but the general nature of which he limned in Abolition of Man. It's an interesting review and the book sounds like an interesting read.

Nagel on Plantinga

Thomas Nagel is an interesting philosopher. He's an atheist who, unlike most contemporary atheists, rejects materialism (i.e. the view that matter is the fundamental reality of the cosmos). He's recently written a book titled Mind and Cosmos: Why Materialism Is Almost Certainly Wrong in which he argues that materialist explanations like Darwinian evolution cannot explain the emergence in the human species of consciousness, cognition, or values - by which he means primarily moral values. Since he also rejects theism - which he admits is the most compelling explanation for these things but one he "can't imagine himself accepting" - he's left with the rather dubious alternative of believing that the fundamental reality is mental and personal but that it's not God.

Be all this as it may Nagel has an excellent essay in the current New York Review of Books on another very interesting philosopher, Alvin Plantinga. Nagel reviews Plantinga's latest book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism in which Plantinga makes a compelling case, the force of which Nagel acknowledges, for the claim that there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.

Here's Nagel's opening:

The gulf in outlook between atheists and adherents of the monotheistic religions is profound. We are fortunate to live under a constitutional system and a code of manners that by and large keep it from disturbing the social peace; usually the parties ignore each other. But sometimes the conflict surfaces and heats up into a public debate. The present is such a time.

One of the things atheists tend to believe is that modern science is on their side, whereas theism is in conflict with science: that, for example, belief in miracles is inconsistent with the scientific conception of natural law; faith as a basis of belief is inconsistent with the scientific conception of knowledge; belief that God created man in his own image is inconsistent with scientific explanations provided by the theory of evolution. In his absorbing new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished analytic philosopher known for his contributions to metaphysics and theory of knowledge as well as to the philosophy of religion, turns this alleged opposition on its head.

His overall claim is that “there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” By naturalism he means the view that the world describable by the natural sciences is all that exists, and that there is no such person as God, or anything like God.

Plantinga’s religion is the real thing, not just an intellectual deism that gives God nothing to do in the world. He himself is an evangelical Protestant, but he conducts his argument with respect to a version of Christianity that is the “rough intersection of the great Christian creeds” — ranging from the Apostle’s Creed to the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles — according to which God is a person who not only created and maintains the universe and its laws, but also intervenes specially in the world, with the miracles related in the Bible and in other ways.

It is of great interest to be presented with a lucid and sophisticated account of how someone who holds these beliefs understands them to harmonize with and indeed to provide crucial support for the methods and results of the natural sciences.

Nagel's review affords the reader an excellent introduction to Plantinga's epistemology which has been extremely influential in philosophy over the last three decades. In fact, Nagel's presentation is so well done that I urge anyone interested in a deeper understanding of Christian epistemology to read it.

After lucidly and respectfully explaining Plantinga's views Nagel concludes with this:

The interest of this book, especially for secular readers, is its presentation from the inside of the point of view of a philosophically subtle and scientifically informed theist—an outlook with which many of them will not be familiar. Plantinga writes clearly and accessibly, and sometimes acidly—in response to aggressive critics of religion like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. His comprehensive stand is a valuable contribution to this debate.

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.

In this review, as in his own book, it seems that Nagel tacitly admits that the arguments of people like Plantinga are so strong that the only reason to not accept them is that one simply cannot bring oneself to believe in the God that lies at their core. But why not? Perhaps Nagel gives us a clue in another of his books titled The Last Word. In the last chapter of The Last Word he writes this:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

In the end, we'll usually believe what we most fervently want to be true and arguments don't often persuade us to do otherwise.

Obamacare in Disarray

Scott Gottlieb is a practicing physician who previously served in senior positions at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He's currently a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. All of which is to say that he probably knows whereof he speaks when he assesses the current state of disarray in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

The Act isn't supposed to be fully implemented until 2014, but those elements which are operational now are not working out as promised. Here's Gottlieb:

A remarkable truth about Obamacare is how many aspects of its initial programs and initiatives are already in disarray.

• The temporary "high risk" pools that Obamacare created, to provide a way for those with pre-existing health conditions to get insurance immediately, are undersubscribed yet way over budget. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the $5 billion allocated to these pools could enroll 200,000 consumers. They envisioned enrollment growing to more than 400,000. But only 77,877 have signed up as of July, yet the program is way over its budget. More than a quarter of these state-based risk pools are short on cash.
• The CLASS Act, which was supposed to provide consumers government-financed long-term care insurance has been abandoned, blowing an $86 billion dollar hole in Obamacare's cost estimates. The CLASS Act was never financially viable. Its costs would have outstripped revenue as soon as it was in full operation. But since it took in money five years before it started to pay out benefits, budget gimmickry let Mr. Obama capture that revenue and use it to finance Obamacare. In abandoning the measure, the President's own health secretary called the scheme "unsustainable."
• The crown jewel of Obamacare's effort to contain healthcare costs, the creation of Accountable Care Organizations, is so unwieldy that major provider groups have said they won't participate. The idea is to consolidate doctors, turning them into employees of large systems, and then pay these systems lump sums of money to take care of groups of patients. A letter from 10 major medical groups that previously ran similar programs said, "it would be difficult, if not impossible" to accept the financial design created by Obamacare. In another rebuke, an umbrella group representing premier medical organizations said 90 percent of its members wouldn't partake.
• New regulations Obamacare puts on insurers have been so unworkable that the Obama team has had to dole out 1,231 waivers. These exemptions are granted when the Obamacare rules are projected to raise healthcare premiums more than 10 percent, or create a "significant decrease in access to healthcare benefits." These waivers haven't been doled out consistently. Entities winning the preferences are over-represented by plans offered by unionized businesses and other administration allies.
• Obamacare can't even settle on an affordable definition to the term "affordable" -- creating the prospect that millions of middle class families will get priced out of coverage. According to a recent editorial in the New York Times, "the people left in the lurch would be those who had lower incomes but were not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid." Because of the way Obamacare defines what's "affordable" to these families, many working-class people would be unable to afford family coverage offered by their employers, and yet they would not qualify for subsidies provided by the law.

Gottlieb closes his depressing litany with this:

We're in a terrible economic climate, where medical utilization trends are way down. The cost of healthcare coverage should be falling as well. But premiums have risen far faster than overall inflation or GDP growth since Obamacare's passage. The regulations kicked in with no offsetting incentives to get people into the insurance pool to help absorb the costs. If the President wants to take credit for these costly insurance market reforms, he also has to accept blame for the rising costs.

So what's left for the President to tout?

Not much. Obamacare isn't even in full swing, and at every turn, the program is crumbling. The President's team is banking on a second term to try and right all of its fiascos but there's an emerging truth that the scheme is simply unworkable.

Reading this prompts the suspicion that the Democrats who gave us this mess, however well-meaning they may have been, simply had no idea what they were doing. They still don't, but they're determined to see it through no matter how much chaos and inefficiency they cause by forcing this calamity upon us.

On the Run

Strategy Page explains how one of the effects of the UAV effort against al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen has been to force them to seek refuge in Syria where they then busy themselves by fighting against the Assad regime:

In the southeast (Hadramout province) tribesmen complain that there have been so many UAV attacks on al Qaeda vehicles lately that civilians are reluctant to go to the hills for picnics. This was usually done in a convoy, full of armed men (for protection from bandits and hostile tribal factions) who could be misinterpreted as an al Qaeda convoy. This rarely happens, as the CIA demands a lot of intel before authorizing an attack. That's why there are so few civilian casualties.

The U.S. believes, based on intercepted communications, interrogations of captured terrorists and reports from informants on the ground that al Qaeda is sending more and more of its personnel to Syria. There it is safer (no American UAVs and missile attacks) and the terrorists expect the Assad dictatorship to fall and the new government to reward al Qaeda (who are doing a lot of the fighting) to be given a sanctuary in Syria.

Getting out of Yemen isn't easy for known al Qaeda members (who need false documents and such), and even those who can easily pass as just another Yemeni need money and coordination with al Qaeda groups in Syria. So not as many al Qaeda men can travel to Syria as quickly as they would like.

The American UAV campaign has been a huge success, killing dozens of key al Qaeda personnel and many lower ranking terrorists. In the last two weeks at least three dozen al Qaeda have been killed by these attacks and so far this year about 200 have died. Many more al Qaeda have been killed or captured by the army in the south, which is out there daily looking for groups of al Qaeda trying to hide while planning more terror attacks and an eventual comeback.

Remember when some critics of the drone campaign were telling us that by hunting down terrorists we were just creating more of them? Maybe so, but which is better: to have lots of terrorists living in constant fear, unable to settle in one area for long, and with no veteran leadership, or to have lots of terrorists living in safety planning attacks against the U.S. under the direction of highly experienced and competent leaders?

Although I think it's true that almost any American president would be doing precisely what President Obama is doing in conducting these drone strikes, he still deserves credit, in my opinion, for ordering them.

The Birth of Modernity

French political scientist Pierre Manent traces the history of the birth of modernity in an essay at City Journal. He opens with these graphs:

We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies. That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern — that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968, and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where.

The Israelites were lucky: they wandered for only 40 years in the desert. If the will to be modern has ceaselessly overturned the conditions of our common life and brought one revolution after another—without achieving satisfaction or reaching a point where we might rest and say, “Here at last is the end of our enterprise”—just what does that mean? How have we been able to will something for such a long time and accept being so often disappointed? Could it be that we aren’t sure what we want?

Though the various signs of the modern are familiar, whether in architecture, art, science, or political organization, we do not know what these traits have in common and what justifies designating them with the same attribute. We find ourselves under the sway of something that seems evident yet defies explication.

Some are inclined to give up asking what we might call the question of the modern. They contend that we have left the modern age and entered the postmodern, renouncing all “grand narratives” of Western progress. I am not so sure, though, that we have renounced the grand modern narratives of science and democracy. We may be experiencing a certain fatigue with the modern after so many modern centuries, but the question of the modern remains, and its urgency does not depend on the disposition of the questioner.

So long as self-understanding matters to us, the question must be raised anew. Even if we do not claim to provide a new answer, we should at least have the ambition to bring the question back to life.

When unsure about the nature of something, we sometimes ask when and how it began. Such an approach is legitimate when investigating the question of the modern, but it immediately raises difficulties. Beginnings are, by definition, obscure. The first sprouts are difficult to discern. One can easily be mistaken. In what time period should we look for the beginnings of modernity? In the eighteenth century, the age of the American and French Revolutions? In the seventeenth century, when the notion of natural science was elaborated? In the sixteenth century, the era of religious reformation?

These diverse origins are not contradictory, since modernity surely includes a religious reformation, science in the modern sense, and political and democratic revolutions. But what is the relationship between the Lutheran faith and the science of Galileo? Is there a primary intellectual and moral disposition that defines modern man? Or must we resign ourselves to the dispersion of the elements of modernity, which we would then see as held together only by the magic of a word?

Manent goes on in the essay to describe how the tension between the city and the Church gave rise to the uniquely modern form of government - the secular, representative democracy of the modern nation state - and how the contemporaries Luther and Machiavelli, inter alia, helped lay the foundations for it.

If you're interested in history Manent's piece is worth the time it takes to read.