Mind and Materialism

Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis discusses the devastating assault on philosophical materialism that began in the 1970s when American philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the question, "What is it like to be a bat?"

Nagel argued that there is something it is like to be a bat whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a stone. Bats, and people, have conscious experience that purely material objects do not have, and it is this conscious experience that is the defining feature of minds.

This experience, Tallis observes, is not a fact about the physical realm:

This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.

This claim has been argued over at great length by myriad philosophers, who have mobilized a series of thought experiments to investigate Nagel’s claim. Among the most famous involves a fictional super-scientist named Mary, who studies the world from a room containing only the colors black and white, but has complete knowledge of the mechanics of optics, electromagnetic radiation, and the functioning of the human visual system.

When Mary is finally released from the room she begins to see colors for the first time. She now knows not only how different wavelengths of light affect the visual system, but also the direct experience of what it is like to see colors. Therefore, felt experiences and sensations are more than the physical processes that underlie them.

Nagel goes on to make the claim, a claim that has put him in the bad graces of his fellow naturalists, that naturalism simply lacks the resources to account for conscious experience. Tallis writes:

But none of the main features of minds — which Nagel identifies as consciousness, cognition, and [moral] value — can be accommodated by this worldview’s [naturalism's] identification of the mind with physical events in the brain, or by its assumption that human beings are no more than animal organisms whose behavior is fully explicable by evolutionary processes.

One might wonder why naturalistic materialists are so reluctant to acknowledge that there's more to us than just physical matter. What difference does it make if an essential aspect of our being is mental? What does it matter if we're not just matter but also a mind? Indeed, what does it matter if we are fundamentally mind?

Perhaps the answer is that given by philosopher J.P.Moreland. Moreland makes an argument in his book Consciousness and the Existence of God that naturalism entails the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy, that is, there are no immaterial substances. Thus, the existence of human consciousness must be explicable in terms of material substance or naturalism is likely to be false. Moreland also argues that there is no good naturalistic explanation for consciousness and that, indeed, the existence of consciousness is strong evidence for the existence of God.

Nagel, an atheist, doesn't go as far as Moreland in believing that the phenomena of conscious experience point to the existence of God, but he comes close, arguing that there must be some mental, telic principle in the universe that somehow imbues the world with consciousness. There is nothing about matter, even the matter which constitutes the brain, that can account for conscious experiences like the sensations of color or a toothache. There's nothing about a chemical reaction or the firing of nerve fibers that can conceivably account for what we experience when we see red, hear middle C, taste sweetness, or feel pain. Nor is there anything about matter that can account for the existence of moral value.

If it turns out that naturalism remains unable to rise to the challenge presented by consciousness then naturalism, and materialism, will forfeit their hegemony among philosophers, a hegemony that has already been seriously eroded.

Read the rest of Tallis' article at the link. It's very good.

The Evolution of Consciousness

One of the many problems consciousness poses for naturalism (the view that only the natural world exists. There is no supernature) is the difficulty of explaining how consciousness could have evolved. Natural selection acts on physical bodies, but consciousness seems to be something altogether different from physical, material body.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent highlights the problem when he writes:

Consciousness could not have evolved from “simpler” states of matter, because it is not a state of matter. To say that consciousness evolved from matter is like saying Newton’s theory of gravity evolved from apples.

Even if for the sake of argument one concedes that natural selection might account for the development of a material body, consciousness remains a mystery. There is still a vast uncrossable gulf between the physical body and mind. In other words, the difference between body and mind is qualitative, not quantitative. You can’t get an immaterial mind no matter how many slight successive modifications of the body there may have been.

This is a serious problem for naturalism because most naturalists hold that naturalism entails physicalism, i.e. the view that physics fixes all the facts about the world, and materialism, the view that all of reality is reducible to matter. Consciousness, however, does not seem to be something explicable in terms either of physics or matter which means that it is a prima facie defeater for naturalism.

Naturalists can avoid utter defeat by conceding that both physicalism and materialism are false and trying somehow to enfold consciousness into a naturalistic ontology, but this would be an accommodation most naturalists would find devastating.

Naturalism dominated philosophy for the two centuries from about 1750 to 1950, but it appears that work being done in the last couple of decades in the philosophy of mind is bringing an end to the reign it once enjoyed and making it increasingly difficult to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist," as Richard Dawkins once put it.

Good at Killing People

This report has created a bit of a controversy among those interested in plumbing President Obama's character and psyche:

President Barack Obama told his staff that he’s “really good at killing people,” according to a new book set to hit shelves Tuesday.

The book, titled “Double Down” and authored by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, reportedly says the Nobel Peace Prize winning president made the comments while discussing drone strikes with his aides.

This is a disturbing revelation, all the moreso since Halperin and Heilemann are both Obama supporters who would not be expected to be trying to make the President look bad.

In time of war most of us certainly do want our leaders to be resolute in taking the fight to the enemy, but it's alarming that a president would actually boast about killing people, especially when, as with Mr. Obama's drone strikes, those whose bodies are blown apart are sometimes women and children.

I don't know the manner in which Mr. Obama said this, or if in fact he even did say it, but I hope that if he did, it was with a sense of deep remorse and not a spirit of gloating. Killing terrorists may be necessary, but it should never be something about which we should brag. To do so erodes our humanity, hardens our hearts, and reduces us to the level of savages. If President Obama was indeed gloating, and he may not have been, what would that say about the man that rather than be filled with deep anguish at being responsible for the deaths of children and other innocent bystanders he would actually find their deaths something to brag about?

Let's hope that our President uttered those words with regret, pain, and irony and not as though he had just birdied a par three on a golf outing.

Gay Marriage and Other Arrangements

Robert George at First Things shares some thoughts that tie in with our recent post at VP on polyamory. George writes:

The logic of the sexual revolution continues to play itself out in exactly the way defenders of “traditional” marriage and norms of sexual morality saw (and said) that it would. When I and many others noted that the abandonment of the idea of marriage as a conjugal union and its replacement with a conception of “marriage” as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership would swiftly be followed by the mainstreaming of polyamory and eventually demands for the legal recognition of “poly” partnerships and families, we were accused of “scare mongering” and making illicit “slippery slope” arguments.

What we saw—and what anyone should easily have seen—is that the displacement of the conjugal conception of marriage left no ground of principle for supposing that marriage is the union of two and only two persons, as opposed to three or more (“throuples,” “triads,” “quadrads,” etc.) in multiple partner sexual ensembles....

Today, fewer and fewer people on the liberal side of questions of marriage and sexual ethics are even pretending to have moral objections to polyamorous sexual relationships or their recognition. ... Moral objections to their ”identity” and the sexual expression of their love is condemned as mere “prejudice.” We must, we are told, fight the “bigots” who are stigmatizing them and “harming their children.” When you have a script that works, I guess you keep using it.

When I posted recently on this topic I added that the mainstreaming of polyamory and other conjugal exotica was inevitable once marriage was no longer restricted to the union of one man and one woman. Some readers protested, not to the argument that legalizing gay marriage would result in opening the legal doors to other marital arrangements, but rather to my conclusion that we therefore shouldn't change the definition of marriage to include homosexual unions.

The objections to the assertion that gay marriage is not a good idea were varied, but they essentially had in common the claim that it's unfair to gays, who are often wonderful people, to deny them the rights that heterosexuals enjoy. Of course, I never said that gays were not fine people, but I did aver that legalizing gay marriage would ultimately mean the end of traditional marriage, which certainly is in a precarious enough state as it is, and that that would not be a good outcome for society.

Some readers took umbrage with my claim that changing the laws that specify that marriage be between a man and a woman will ultimately result in changing the laws that specify that marriage must only be between two people. Their objection was based on their personal incredulity that anyone would really want to do this. Their inability to imagine that people would push for various forms of polyamory notwithstanding, however, it's almost inevitable that once we no longer limit marriage to men and women limiting marriage to just two people will also become equally anachronistic.

If requiring that marriage be between a man and woman is merely an arbitrary limitation based on personal taste and custom why isn't limiting marriage to just two people also arbitrary and unjustifiable? Some readers invoked the "icky" factor, declaring that polyamory is just icky, forgetting, perhaps, that this was at one time a major objection to gay marriage as well.

But let's grant for the sake of discussion that marriage should be limited to just two people. Then what? Suppose two siblings wished to marry. Should they be permitted to do so? If not, why not? What compelling reason would there be to deny two siblings who loved each other the same rights that non-siblings have? Please don't reply that that would be "icky." Ickiness doesn't count as a compelling reason.

Suppose you say that siblings should not be allowed to marry. What if the two siblings were gay or lesbian? Should they then be permitted to marry if they wish? If not, why not? If so, doesn't it discriminate against heterosexual siblings to prohibit to them a right given to homosexual siblings? And if incest is no longer prohibited, why on earth should any other consensual arrangement be prohibited, regardless of the number of partners?

Indeed, why must marriage be consensual at all? In much of the world it's certainly not, and throughout much of history it hasn't been. What reason is there for legally preventing fathers from giving their pre-pubescent daughters as brides to other men? Is it not merely a Western cultural prejudice that sustains the laws against doing this? How can we justify keeping laws on the books that are based on nothing more substantial than cultural prejudice? And if we're not going to allow cultural prejudices to keep us from betrothing our daughters to other men then, if gay marriage is acceptable, why should we be legally prohibited from giving our sons to other men for the same purpose?

The proponent of gay marriage might object that this would be both icky and wrong, but if we ask them to explain preciselywhy it's wrong it's hard to imagine what answer they could give. They'd simply reply, presumably, that it's offensive to them to subject children to non-consensual marriage, but it's a long way from being personally offensive to being wrong. After all, the fact that many people oppose gay marriage because they find it personally offensive is not considered by gay marriage proponents to be anywhere close to being a good reason to think gay marriage wrong or to keep it illegal.

Once we've started down the slippery slope by removing the requirement that marriage be restricted to one man and one woman, there's no logical way to stop the slide. There's no non-arbitrary place on the slope at which we can say that this is where the line must be drawn. If you think there is you're welcome to explain where that line is and why the slide wouldn't take us all the way to non-consensual child betrothal. Or beyond.

Once Pandora opens the box who knows what's going to come flying out? When we tinker with an institution that's thousands of years old the effects ramify throughout the culture. It's simply naive to think that nothing much would change.

Whether or not gays really yearn to marry their partners or whether they are good people is in fact irrelevant to the argument. The critical question is what effect gay marriage would have on marriage itself and ultimately upon our culture. By undermining the traditional one man, one woman formula I maintain that it'd be a cultural calamity.

Hawking's Hypocrisy

Columnist Mona Charen observes that world famous physicist Stephen Hawking has decided to decline an invitation to speak in Israel after hearing from Palestinian academics that to do so, one supposes, would be to be complicit in Israel's alleged crimes against the Palestinian people.

Charen deftly skewers the hypocrisy, or if not hypocrisy, certainly the mindlessness, of Hawking's decision. She writes:

Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist and celebrity, has canceled a planned trip to Israel, where he was invited to participate in a conference sponsored by Israeli president Shimon Peres. His explanation: “I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference.”

It’s an odd world, isn’t it? By what inverted moral calculus does someone of Hawking’s stature find it morally problematic to set foot on the soil of the region’s only democracy? One wonders: How many other nations has Hawking declined to visit in order to express his disapproval of their policies?

She goes on to note that Hawking did not scruple to visit the old Soviet Union when it was one of the world's chief violators of human rights, nor did he shrink from visiting the Ayatollah's Iran in 2007, a country that not only sponsors terrorism around the world but imprisons Christians, stones women to death for adultery, and hangs both apostates from Islam as well as homosexuals.

Evidently, Mr. Hawking's moral fastidiousness only bothers him when it comes to Israel. Indeed, why is it that of all the nations in the world which treat their own citizens, not to mention those of their neighbors, abysmally, Israel almost exclusively singled out as particularly worthy of what Charen refers to as BDS (boycotts, divestments, and sanctions)?

It is especially peculiar that Israel is deemed uniquely worthy of punishment when it's recalled that Israel has a substantial minority population of Arabs who enjoy all the benefits of citizenship in a free and open democracy, even being permitted to practice their religion and hold political office. I can't think of one Arab country in which Jews are granted anything close to similar status.

In most Arab countries Jews (and Christians) live a tenuous existence where the best policy is to keep one's head down and mouth shut and maybe you won't have your house burned, your children seized and your life forfeit.

Charen also mentions that Arabs, and those like Hawking and other celebrities eager to demonstrate their political hipness and moral grandiosity, often express outrage that the Israelis built a wall between Israel and Palestinian Gaza which works a hardship on some Gazans who find themselves separated from their places of employment by the barrier. This, they say, is an intolerable cruelty.

Indeed, the wall is unfortunate, but why did the Israelis build it? Before the wall was erected Palestinian terrorists were easily crossing into Israel and blowing up Israeli schoolchildren and murdering Israeli families almost weekly. Rather than doing what most of the countries with which Hawking has no moral quarrel would do, which is to simply bomb Gaza into pulverized sand and dust, Israel simply built a fence to keep the terrorists out, and it has worked. But that simple non-violent measure of self-protection is too much for the delicate sensibilities of Hawking, et al., and he refuses to travel to a country which would be so insensitive to the rights of Palestinian Arabs as to protect themselves from their depradations.

Like so many on the left, Hawking seems to believe that Israel has a moral obligation to allow itself to be obliterated by its enemies, and if it refuses to cooperate in its own destruction then it's ipso facto not the sort of place that deserves to be graced by his awesomeness.

Is it All Intentional?

For some time now a number of commentators on the right, most notably Rush Limbaugh, have been insisting that the failures of the Obama administration, which most people, even among Democrats, ascribe to incompetence and a general disdain for the details of governing, are in fact part of a deliberate effort to cripple the United States both economically and militarily to make it easier to impose a socialist economic model on the nation and to diminish the ability of the U.S. to "bully" the rest of the world.

In the wake of the events of the last couple of months proponents of this view seem to be growing more numerous and more vocal. Norman Podhoretz, formerly the editor of Commentary, has made a case for it at the Wall Street Journal.

It ultimately comes down to whether one believes that Mr. Obama and his acolytes are unqualified by either intellect, temperament, or experience for the positions they hold or whether one believes they are diabolically brilliant strategists determined to transform this country, by whatever means necessary, into their vision of a Marxist/socialist dystopia.

Perhaps Podhoretz and Limbaugh are correct. There's certainly much to commend their theory, especially in the wake of revelations about the Obamacare rollout which almost seems to have been deliberately sabotaged by HHS, but I think the most parsimonious explanation for the debacles and scandals we've witnessed in the IRS, the Department of Justice, the Obamacare rollout, the economy, the stimulus, and our actions abroad is that nothing in Mr. Obama's biography prepared him to lead a government, much less this entire country, much less the world. I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt that he really believes that the policies he's ostensibly pursuing, at home and abroad, are best for the nation. I think he's completely and even catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but I'm willing to allow that he really believes he's right.

To accept the Limbaugh/Podhoretz's thesis, after all, one would have to believe that this president, a man with a towering ego, would nevertheless be willing to suffer the humiliation of being considered a disastrous failure and ranked among the worst presidents ever to occupy the office, in order to deviously effect the transformation of the country by deliberately bringing it to its knees. Maybe such treachery is indeed afoot, but I think we need more evidence than what's been adduced so far before embracing such a theory. Even Limbaugh seems unable to make up his mind whether Mr. Obama is a malevolent genius or a complete incompetent.

Of course, there is yet a third, even more disturbing possibility, which is that Mr. Obama is really just a figurehead, a puppet who allows himself to be cleverly used and manipulated by sinister puppet masters behind the scenes. It's possible, but there's no evidence at all that I'm aware of that it's true.

In any case, whether the explanation is gross incompetence, or a brilliantly conceived, convoluted conspiracy, or some combination of the two, there's no comfort in any of them for those concerned about what's happening to the country or who care about the country their children and grandchildren will inherit.

Mind or Matter

One of the many fascinating questions being revived in today's philosophical debates is the question of the ultimate nature of reality. In other words, what is the world fundamentally made of? For the last two hundred years, and still today, the consensus answer among scientists and philosophers is that matter is the fundamental constituent of the world. Everything in the world, it's believed, can be reduced to matter or energy.

This view is called metaphysical materialism, but despite its status as the consensus view there have always been prominent thinkers who've insisted that materialism is quite wrong. There has long been a substantial minority of very brilliant men who believe that the material world is really an expression of mind and that mind is fundamental. This view is usually referred to as metaphysical idealism.

Here are a few examples of quotes from scientists and philosophers who embrace(d) one form or another of metaphysical idealism:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, 1944

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else. Erwin Schroedinger, quantum physicist

It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality. Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner, 1961

If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. Thomas Nagel, author of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, 2012.

What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that the experimenter’s free will and consciousness should be considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory. So for instance, in experiments involving “entanglement” (the phenomenon Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'), to conclude that quantum correlations of two particles are nonlocal (i.e. cannot be explained by signals traveling at velocity less than or equal to the speed of light), it is crucial to assume that the experimenter can make free choices and is not constrained in what orientation he/she sets the measuring devices. To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time. Antoine Suarez, 2013

So what does it matter (no pun intended)? If mind is fundamental then it may follow, psychologically if not logically, that personality is as well, and pretty soon it looks as if fundamental reality is in fact the God of traditional theism.

This is an intolerable conclusion for metaphysical naturalists who thought they had laid God to rest in the 19th century. Now it appears that the matter is far from settled, and as we enter into the second decade of the twenty-first century there's an interesting philosophical donnybrook brewing over whether science and philosophy, so far from having proven there is no God, are actually, even if inadvertently, accumulating increasing evidence that there is.

Polyamory

One of the first posts I ever wrote on Viewpoint back in May of 2004 was on why I think gay marriage is a very bad idea. The post was not motivated by an animus against gay people but rather by a desire to preserve the institution of marriage which I believe would be radically transformed, if not dissolved entirely, by legalizing homosexual marital unions.

The argument is simple. Marriage has traditionally been seen as a union of one man and one woman. Once we decide as a society that the gender of the people in the union no longer matters we will have no grounds for resisting the further step of concluding that neither does the number of people in the union matter. In other words, marriage will inevitably come to be almost anything anyone wants it to be and when marriage is anything at all then it will pretty much cease to exist as anything more than a remnant of what it once was.

The argument is not without its critics. Some have derided it as a mere slippery slope argument, which is a silly objection since there's nothing wrong with slippery slope arguments. Others say that unions of more than two people are just gross, and no one would really want to do it, as if there were not a sizeable number of people who wouldn't do whatever they were legally allowed to do. I'm sure that there are a lot of people who would love even to marry their pets were the law to allow them.

As for marriages involving multiple partners (polyamory) the movement for this particular proclivity already exists and its votaries are biding until gay marriage gains full legal acceptance. When that day arrives polyamorists will begin pushing for their own particular notion of wedded bliss, and what compelling reason could anyone have for denying arrangements in which multiple men enter into matrimonial union with multiple women once we've decided that the gender of the spouses in a marriage no longer matters?

If you doubt that this is the inevitable next step in the marriage debate then read a pair of articles by the pseudonymous polyamorist Michael Carey at Slate here and here. What he says makes pretty clear what challenges will be facing our courts of law in the near future.

Although it's not the point of this post, I'd like to comment on something Mr. Carey says at the outset of the first article. He writes:

In the course of defending their right to treat gay people as second-class citizens, conservatives have frequently deployed slippery-slope arguments: “If we accept same-sex relationships, what will we have to tolerate next? Bestiality? Pederasty? Polygamy?” While these arguments are stupid, the people making them are not, or at least not always. They’re doing their best to trot out a parade of horribles that will shock the sensibilities of most Americans.

Clearly we should be shocked by violations of consent. (Reminder: Children and animals can’t consent!)

In other words, Mr. Carey maintains, gay marriage, plural marriage, and traditional marriage are all based on consent whereas those other "horribles" are not. I wonder, though, how long consent would matter in a society that has lost any objective grounds for moral discrimination.

A society that has no transcendent basis for objective moral duties, a foundation that only theism can provide, will eventually subjectivize morality, and when morality is subjectivized it will inevitably devolve into the simple philosophy of might-makes-right. Those who possess the power to do what they wish will find their behavior sanctioned by a society that lacks the moral resources to disapprove any kind of behavior and which will almost certainly lack the will to pass judgment on the behavior of the powerful.

When we reach that point, which may not be as far off as we might hope, the law will eventually be made to conform to the moral consensus, those "horribles" will no longer seem so horrible, and consent will be treated as a quaint anachronism.

Who's in Charge?

The President doesn't seem to know anything more about what's going on in his own administration than anyone else who watches the evening news, leading some to wonder who's actually running the country:

Let's see. If Mr. Obama isn't really in the loop, so to speak, who is? Who's in charge at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Valerie Jarrett? George Soros? Joe Biden? Nancy Pelosi? Harry Reid? Yikes!

Speaking of being out of the loop, Jon Stewart appears to be mystified by the seeming ineptitude of it all:

If You Like it You Can Keep it

Lisa Myers and Helen Rappleye at NBC have broken a story confirming what many critics of the Affordable Care Act have been alleging for several years now: When President Obama assured us as recently as last year that if we liked our insurance we could keep it he knew that what he was saying was false.

Here's the lede of the NBC story:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “If you like your health plan, you'll be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance” even though he apparently knew that millions would not be able to keep their insurance. Here's the President in 2009 insisting in unambiguous terms that no one will have to give up their health care plans:

Despite these asseverations millions of people are losing their insurance under Obamacare or seeing their premiums rise astronomically. Some of their stories are included at the link.

Recently we've learned that when the President told us that the Benghazi raid was a response to an offensive video he knew that was false. When he told us that he didn't know that the NSA was spying on our allies' heads of state that was false, he evidently signed off on the directive to do it. When he told us that the White House had nothing to do with the IRS scandal, that was false. Now we're learning that even as he was doubling down on his promise that we'd be able to keep our current insurance if we so wished he knew that was false.

How long can the President of the United States blatantly and deliberately try to deceive the American people before the people's confidence in government is utterly destroyed? Can anybody trust anything that anyone in this administration says?

I'm reminded of the words of John Adams, our second President, who wrote that our system of government was created for a moral and religious people and is "wholly inadequate for any other." What happens when a nation so founded finds itself governed by people who feel no moral duty to tell us the truth?

Facepalm Sweepstakes

It's amazing that any informed individual would be surprised by what's happening in the insurance market as a result of the Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare). People have to have either been living in a cave for the last three years or in complete denial of what was going to happen to them when health care "reform" kicked in. They certainly can't say they weren't warned. Consider the tale of this unfortunate woman mentioned in a story in the LA Times:

Fullerton resident Jennifer Harris thought she had a great deal, paying $98 a month for an individual plan through Health Net Inc. She got a rude surprise this month when the company said it would cancel her policy at the end of this year. Her current plan does not conform with the new federal rules, which require more generous levels of coverage.

Now Harris, a self-employed lawyer, must shop for replacement insurance. The cheapest plan she has found will cost her $238 a month. She and her husband don't qualify for federal premium subsidies because they earn too much money, about $80,000 a year combined.

"It doesn't seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else," said Harris, who is three months pregnant. "This increase is simply not affordable."

I want to sympathize with Ms Harris, but I want to ask first who she voted for in 2012. The depth of my sympathy would depend upon her answer. Her experience has been the experience of millions of others across the country who are seeing their premiums skyrocket:

On balance, many Americans will benefit from the healthcare expansion. They are guaranteed coverage regardless of their medical history. And lower-income families will gain access to comprehensive coverage at little or no cost. The federal government picks up much of the tab through an expansion of Medicaid and subsidies to people earning up to four times the federal poverty level. That's up to $46,000 for an individual or $94,000 for a family of four.

But middle-income consumers face an estimated 30% rate increase, on average, in California due to several factors tied to the healthcare law.

Some may elect to go without coverage if they feel prices are too high. Penalties for opting out are very small initially. Defections could cause rates to skyrocket if a diverse mix of people don't sign up for health insurance.

In order to insure more of those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, Obamacare makes it almost impossible for those further up to afford insurance. The average premium increase across the country for males is almost 100%. The average for females is about 65%. In most states if you buy your own insurance, you'll pretty much be working just to pay your premiums. That's if you're working at all. Mr. Obama's economy is so depressed that millions of young people, especially minorities, simply can't find a job anywhere.

Let's close with this. The Times piece includes a statement by a young woman that should make her a finalist in the facepalm sweepstakes:

Pam Kehaly, president of Anthem Blue Cross in California, said she received a recent letter from a young woman complaining about a 50% rate hike related to the healthcare law.

"She said, 'I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,'" Kehaly said.

That's liberalism in one succinct sentence. Let's give everything to everybody as long as everybody but me is paying for it.

Grotesque Consequences

Here are two quotes, one from holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl, a free will libertarian and one from the famous twentieth century trial attorney and determinist Clarence Darrow. Together they illustrate vividly the consequences of a belief that our behavior and our choices are the product of our brain chemistry and nothing more. First Darrow:

The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is because I really do not in the least believe in crime. There is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral condition of the people in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other.

The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can avoid being outside. I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible.

And here's Frankl:

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

I think Frankl is much closer to the truth, and to the reality of human experience, than is Darrow. Darrow was a philosophical materialist, that is, he believed that everything could be reduced to the swirl of atoms. His determinism was a logical consequence of that belief, but when the consequence of one's beliefs does away with the distinction between good and evil, when the consequence of one's belief is that the Nazis responsible for the suffering of millions in the holocaust were no more nor less moral than those who risked their lives to smuggle Jews out of Europe, then I think we need to reassess the belief that leads to such grotesque consequences.

Train Wrecks

Evidently the Obamacare rollout (and Obamacare itself) aren't the only "train wrecks" the administration has inflicted upon itself and the nation (Check out the column by Kirsten Powers at The Daily Beast). Our Middle East policy is also rapidly unraveling as our allies in the region feel increasingly betrayed by a White House that seems willing to sell them out to appease Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

David Ignatius writes for the Washington Post, a paper that has been solidly pro-Obama, but he nevertheless says this:

What should worry the Obama administration is that Saudi concern about U.S. policy in the Middle East is shared by the four other traditional U.S. allies in the region: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They argue (mostly privately) that Obama has shredded U.S. influence by dumping President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, opposing the coup that toppled Morsi, vacillating in its Syria policy, and now embarking on negotiations with Iran — all without consulting close Arab allies.

Saudi King Abdullah privately voiced his frustration with U.S. policy in a lunch in Riyadh Monday with King Abdullah of Jordan and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the U.A.E., according to a knowledgeable Arab official. The Saudi monarch “is convinced the U.S. is unreliable,” this official said. “I don’t see a genuine desire to fix it” on either side, he added.

The bad feeling that developed after Mubarak’s ouster deepened month by month: The U.S. supported Morsi’s election as president; opposed a crackdown by the monarchy in Bahrain against Shiites protesters; cut aid to the Egyptian military after it toppled Morsi and crushed the Brotherhood; promised covert aid to the Syrian rebels it never delivered; threatened to bomb Syria and then allied with Russia, instead; and finally embarked on a diplomatic opening to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s deadly rival in the Gulf.

The policies were upsetting; but the deeper damage resulted from the Saudi feeling that they were being ignored — and even, in their minds, double crossed. In the traditional Gulf societies, any such sense of betrayal can do lasting damage, yet the administration let the problems fester.

Michael Totten at World Affairs Journal summarizes the mess we seem to be creating in the Middle East this way:

The American-Saudi alliance is in danger of collapsing.

The Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis is by far the largest threat to both Saudi and American interests in the Middle East now, yet the Obama administration is buddying up with Vladimir Putin on Syria and allowing itself to be suckered by the Iranian regime’s new president Hassan Rouhani.

Never mind the fact that Rouhani obviously isn’t a moderate and is powerless to negotiate sovereign issues in any case. The White House is so desperate to cut a deal with America’s enemies that the president will go along on even a farcical ride. As a result, the Saudi government is threatening to drastically “scale back” the relationship.

“I’ve worked in this field for a long time,” says Brooking Institution expert Mike Doran in London’s Telegraph, “and I’ve studied the history. I know of no analogous period. I’ve never seen so many disagreements on so many key fronts all at once. And I’ve never seen such a willingness on the part of the Saudis to publicly express their frustration. Iran is the number one issue — the only issue for Saudi policy makers. When you add up the whole Middle Eastern map — Syria, Iraq, Iran — it looks to the Saudis as if the US is throwing Sunni allies under the bus by trying to cut a deal with Iran and its allies.”

Foreign Policy 101 dictates that you reward your friends and punish your enemies. Attempts to get cute and reverse the traditional formula always lead to disaster. Yet Barack Obama thinks if he stiffs his friends, his enemies will become a little less hostile. That’s not how it works, but the Saudis have figured out what Obama is doing and are acting accordingly.

“They [the Americans] are going to be upset—and we can live with that,” said Mustafa Alani, a Saudi foreign policy analyst. "We are learning from our enemies now how to treat the United States.”

Totten goes on to explain how distasteful he finds the Saudi regime but how necessary it is that we maintain a strong relationship with them. He's right on both counts. The Saudis are a potent force in the Middle East, in the war on terror, and in the effort to counter Iran whose pursuit of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to Israel as well as the entire region.

Much of the U.S. and indeed much of the world seem to be holding on until 2016 when a new administration that, one hopes, knows what it's doing takes over the reins in Washington. Until then perhaps the most that can be done is to try to minimize the damage inflicted by a political leadership determined to "fundamentally transform" America and diminish its role in the world.

Does Your i-phone Have Free Will?

An article at the blog physics arxiv explores the problem of free will and comes to the weird conclusion that not only do humans possess it but so might your i-phone. Here's how the article begins:

The problem of free will is one of the great unsolved puzzles in science, not to mention philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and so on. The basic question is whether we are able to make decisions for ourselves or whether the outcomes are predetermined and the notion of choice is merely an illusion.

There are two relatively new ideas that are particularly relevant [to the problem]. The first is quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the universe on the smallest scale. The second is the theory of computation which underpins much of modern technology and most of what passes for research in artificial intelligence. What bearing do these theories have on our understanding of free will?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Seth Lloyd, one of the world’s leading quantum mechanics theorists, who is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Lloyd argues that quantum mechanics does not provide any mechanism that helps us understand free will. By contrast, he shows that the theory of computation is far more useful.

He argues that there are clear mechanisms in computation that make the outcome of a given calculation unpredictable, especially to the person or object making it. The key contribution of this latest work is a mathematical proof of this idea.

It is this inability to know the outcome of our own deliberations that gives rise to our impression that we possess free will, he says.

You'll have to read the rest of the article to see what this has to do with the i-phone, but what's not clear about the section excerpted above is whether there is a distinction to be made between the "impression" of having free will and the reality of free will. It's one thing to feel that our choices are free. We all experience that. The problem is whether the feeling of freedom is an illusion, and it doesn't seem to me that Lloyd's contribution makes it clear that he's talking about the ontological reality of libertarian free will and not just a deep but illusory sense that we're exercising a free choice when we make a decision.

In other words, if all he's doing is explaining why we feel free, that's not especially helpful. What's needed is a compelling argument that demonstrates that we are, in fact, genuinely free to choose between alternatives. It's that argument that has eluded scientists and philosophers since the time of the ancient Greeks.

Choosing Free Will

Jonathan Schooler wrote an interesting column on free will at Big Questions Online this past August. Schooler has researched the difference that belief in free will makes in people's lives, and he reports on his results in the article.

In the course of his essay Schooler outlines three basic positions philosophers and scientists hold on the issue. One view, popular among many who hold to metaphysical naturalism (the belief that the natural world is all there is; there's no supernatural), is called Hard Determinism. Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and a metaphysical naturalist, adumbrates the determinist's position with these words:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons…So, although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us, and we cannot change that.

Another view, called Compatibilism, seeks to find a media via between determinism and libertarianism. Schooler writes:

Compatibilism ’s assumption ... that genuine free will can exist in an entirely deterministic universe is by far the most popular view among modern philosophers. However, it is very difficult for me to gain an intuitive understanding of how our decisions can be in any real sense free if they are the unavoidable consequence of deterministic and potentially random processes.

It may be popular, but it's something of a squishy cop-out. Schooler's objection to it is well-taken. It's difficult to see how, in a universe in which the laws of physics determine everything, those laws can be circumvented in the mental processes that create our choices.

The third view, Libertarianism, is Schooler's preferred position. He says:

The Libertarian view that conscious intent somehow transcends the causal chain of physical events most closely resonates with my personal experience, but it is difficult (though perhaps not impossible) to imagine how this might happen.

Indeed, it is. The idea of a free choice is devilishly difficult to flesh out. Even the Libertarian believes that our choices are caused by something - our character, our desires, our hopes, etc. - and if these things are the cause of our choices why do they not determine our choices? Here's Schooler again:

The lack of a fully satisfying conceptualization of free will leads me to conclude that all three major views are contenders, but I yearn for the formulation of other accounts that could be more readily reconciled with both logic and experience.

Given this quandary, each of us is faced with deciding the matter for ourselves. The conclusion we draw will depend on our personal predispositions and for many be informed by logic and scientific evidence.

He might have also said that the conclusion we draw will likely be a function of our worldview. If we're naturalists we'll tend to be determinists because we believe that physics fixes all the facts of our cognitive experience. If we're theists we'll tend to be libertarians because we'll believe that we're accountable to God for our behavior, and such accountability can only exist if we're in some sense free.

If there's no way to show which view is correct perhaps we're justified in believing the one having the best consequences for how we live our everyday lives and which seems most compatible with our everyday experience. This is, in fact, Schooler's advice:

Yet as William James observed ... when an idea cannot be evaluated on reason alone, it may be appropriate to:

"Grant an idea or belief to be true," and ask "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"

For myself, the functionality of a belief in free will, both as revealed by research and through personal experience, contributes to its appeal. Free will from my perspective is like sailing a ship; we are buffeted by innumerable forces out of our control and will inevitably get somewhere regardless of what we do. However, if we take the helm we are more likely to end up where we want to go.

It's very difficult to live consistently as a determinist. In our daily experience we simply assume at almost every moment that we are free. Moreover, if we are not free the consequences for our moral lives, for our judgments of what others deserve, and for our own human dignity, are severe. Determinism, if true, undermines them all.

Paradoxically, if determinism is true, the determinist cannot fault the libertarian for clinging to his belief in free will since his decision to do so was determined by his environment and/or his genes. The libertarian isn't responsible for having made the choice to be a libertarian and can't be blamed for it. Of course, it's also the case that determinists are determinists not because of the truth of that position but because they were somehow determined by those same forces to believe in determinism.

It's a rather odd position the determinist finds himself in.

Who Is the Tea Party?

Listening to MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning I heard Harvard professor Louis Gates make the claim that the tea party has a lot of racial bigots among their number. As others on the show nodded knowingly I waited for the professor to offer some bit of evidence in support of his very serious allegation but none was forthcoming.

Later in the day a friend told me about the comments of Democratic congressman Alan Grayson who claimed that the tea party was filled with racists and who made a number of claims about various incidents, some of which might be construed as racist if they were true, but none of which he felt constrained to substantiate. In other words, they were all based on hearsay and we were just supposed to take Grayson's word for their veracity.

Apparently Gates and Grayson assume two premises from which they draw a rather strange conclusion. They assume that 1) All racists would oppose President Obama and that 2) All tea partiers oppose President Obama. Both of these premises are doubtless true, but the conclusion they apparently draw from them is that 3) Therefore, tea partiers are racists. This is called by logicians the fallacy of undistributed middle. It's like arguing that because collies are dogs and poodles are dogs that therefore collies are poodles. Such is the violence perpetrated against reason by those desperate to discredit their political opponents but who lack the arguments necessary to do it rationally.

To learn who the tea partiers are one might spend less time listening to people like Louis Gates and Alan Grayson and more time reading former Clinton advisor William Galston. In a very helpful column at the Wall Street Journal Galston compares the modern tea party to the Jacksonian Democrats of the early 19th century and finds them remarkably similar. Citing an essay by Russell Walter Mead, Galston explains that:

Jacksonians ... embrace a distinctive code, whose key tenets include self-reliance, individualism, loyalty and courage.

Jacksonians care as passionately about the Second Amendment as Jeffersonians do about the First. They are suspicious of federal power, skeptical about do-gooding at home and abroad; they oppose federal taxes but favor benefits such as Social Security and Medicare that they regard as earned. Jacksonians are anti-elitist; they believe that the political and moral instincts of ordinary people are usually wiser than those of the experts and that, as Mr. Mead wrote, "while problems are complicated, solutions are simple."

That is why the Jacksonian hero defies the experts and entrenched elites and "dares to say what the people feel" without caring in the least what the liberal media will say about him. (Think Ted Cruz.)

The tea party is Jacksonian America, aroused, angry and above all fearful, in full revolt against a new elite—backed by the new American demography—that threatens its interests and scorns its values.

This sounds to me just about right. The folks who gravitate toward tea party rallies are people who value their constitutional freedoms and see those freedoms under assault by an entrenched leftist elite determined to override the will of the people and impose a European style cradle to the grave socialism which will essentially reduce citizens to little more than servants of the government.

Galston continues:

According to two benchmark surveys by the New York Times tea-party supporters espouse an ensemble of conservative beliefs with special intensity. Fifty-eight percent think that minorities get too much attention from government, and 65% view immigrants as a burden on the country. Most of the respondents see President Obama as someone who doesn't understand them and doesn't share their values. In their eyes, he's an extreme liberal whose policies consistently favor the poor. In fact, 92% believe that he is moving the country toward socialism.

But are the people who hold these beliefs less educated and "lower class" than the rest of America as many liberals portray them?

Many frustrated liberals, and not a few pundits, think that people who share these beliefs must be downscale and poorly educated. The New York Times survey found the opposite. Only 26% of tea-party supporters regard themselves as working class, versus 34% of the general population; 50% identify as middle class (versus 40% nationally); and 15% consider themselves upper-middle class (versus 10% nationally). Twenty-three percent are college graduates, and an additional 14% have postgraduate training, versus 15% and 10%, respectively, for the overall population. Conversely, only 29% of tea-party supporters have just a high-school education or less, versus 47% for all adults.

The tea party is not an independent political party but is largely "a dissident reform movement within the party, determined to move it back toward true conservatism after what they see as the apostasies of the Bush years and the outrages of the Obama administration."

Many tea-party supporters are small businessmen who see taxes and regulations as direct threats to their livelihood. Unlike establishment Republicans who see potential gains from government programs such as infrastructure funding, these tea partiers regard most government spending as a deadweight loss. Because many of them run low-wage businesses on narrow margins, they believe that they have no choice but to fight measures, such as ObamaCare, that reduce their flexibility and raise their costs—measures to which large corporations with deeper pockets can adjust.

It's no coincidence that the strengthening influence of the tea party is driving a wedge between corporate America and the Republican Party. It's hard to see how the U.S. can govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party—or switches sides.

Galston has more on who tea partiers are at the link. It's worth reading. My friend Jason, who is himself a historian and to whom I'm indebted for the Galston link, points out the irony that his fellow historians tend to associate the Jacksonian Era with "more" democracy (i.e. a proportional increase in white male suffrage, for example) which seems to suggest that the opposition to tea partiers by "corporate America" and the "Republican establishment" is actually anti-democratic. Quite so.

It's also ironic that 19th century Jacksonians are generally esteemed as heroes in the Democrat pantheon and yet it's Democrats who are most hostile to what the modern Jacksonians in the tea party stand for. I guess it shows how far the Democrat Party has wandered from its historical roots.

White Privilege

A number of years ago (12/19/08) I ran the following post. I thought I'd do it again, slightly revised, because correspondents have recently expressed thoughts somewhat similar to those written by this student in 2008:

I recently received a beautiful e-mail from a student who expressed her desire to give back to those who have less than she does something of the abundance with which she has been blessed. This young woman's wish to help others is wonderful, and I'm deeply impressed with her commitment to the poor and marginalized.

There was one thing she said in her missive, however, which is a common sentiment on her campus and one which I asked her to reconsider. She stated that part of the obligation she feels to help the poor is a result of the fact that she's "a white, middle class, educated female with a tremendous amount of undeserved privilege." I know students are encouraged by liberal professors to think that one's race or gender confer upon one a large measure of undeserved privilege, but to tell the truth, I think my colleagues are just plain wrong about this.

The idea of white privilege is a shibboleth that's too often used to evoke in whites a sense of racial guilt. In my response to this student I tried to explain why I think her acceptance of this guilt actually diminishes the choices and sacrifices made by her grandparents, parents, and even herself. Here's what I wrote:

Dear S_,

Yours is a lovely e-mail, and I think it's wonderful that you want to give of yourself to those who subsist on the margins of society. I wish you well and pray God's blessing on your efforts.

I do want to urge you, though, to consider something. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into what you say, but you seem to suggest that your status in society is somehow an undeserved privilege. If that is what you're saying I don't think you should see it that way.

You are what you are and have what you have for a couple of reasons. First, your parents and grandparents worked very hard, sometimes 12 or more hours a day, I'll bet, to provide you with an opportunity to get an education. Your status is largely the fruit of their toil, as well as dozens of other important and wise choices they made in life, and it's not something you should feel guilty about. Indeed, I think it diminishes their effort to think of your status as merely a consequence of your race. So far from feeling that your privilege is undeserved, I think you should be proud of the people who made it possible and grateful for their sacrifices and the choices they made.

The second reason you enjoy the status you do is because, once given the opportunities your parents and grandparents worked so hard for, you had the character to make the most of them. You took advantage of the opportunity to get an education, you held yourself to high standards through your teen years, and you had the wisdom to not squander the heritage handed down to you.

None of this is a result of your race. I know that some instructors on campus think that being white somehow confers an unfair advantage over others in society, but I think that's mistaken. It was true historically, of course, but it hasn't been the case in the U.S. for a long time. No one has been denied opportunity in this country by virtue of his or her race for well over fifty years. If people in the U.S. languish in poverty it's because of the choices both they and their parents have made, not the color of their skin.

The fact is that there are lots of African and Asian-Americans who are successful in this society, but no one talks about black privilege or brown privilege. Instead they talk, as they should, about how hard the parents of those people worked and the ordeals their parents endured in order to give their children a chance to make it in the world. Contrarily, there are whites, blacks and Asians who enjoy historically unprecedented opportunities to make a positive mark in life but fail to do so because they lack the character it takes to make something of themselves.

In other words, you enjoy the status you do, S_, not because you're privileged by your race but because you're privileged to have the parents and virtues you do. It's wonderful to want to "give back" but don't let anyone imply that you should do so out of guilt over your race or class. Your motivation should be your love for God and the conviction that he wants you to be an instrument to help others become what you are.

There's nothing more lethal to the aspirations of those mired in the underclass than the claim that they can't make it out of their circumstances because of their race. That falsehood seeps into the psyche of a man or woman and becomes an excuse for failure and a justification for not trying. Nor does it ennoble the efforts of those who choose to do good work among the poor to be motivated by a mistaken need to expiate some false sense of racial guilt.

Category Five Rollout

The best piece I've seen on the calamity that has been the Obamacare rollout is by Yuval Levin at NRO. It's very even-handed, there's no I-told-you-so's or gloating, just a lot of facts gleaned from talking to acquaintances close to the problems. Here's an excerpt:

If the problems now plaguing the system are not resolved by mid-November and the flow of enrollments at that point looks like it does now, the prospects for the first year of the exchanges will be in very grave jeopardy. Some large advertising and outreach campaigns are also geared to that crucial six-week period around Thanksgiving and Christmas, so if the sites are not functional, all of that might not happen—or else might be wasted. If that’s what the late fall looks like, the administration might need to consider what one of the people I spoke with described as “unthinkable options” regarding the first year of the exchanges.

The nightmare scenarios, the “unthinkable options,” involve larger moves ... like putting enrollment on hold or re-starting the exchange system from scratch at some point. No one seems to know how this could work or what it would mean, but everyone involved is contending with a far worse set of circumstances than they were prepared for. This is a major disaster from their point of view, not a set of glitches, and they simply do not know how long it will take to fix. They dearly want to see progress day by day, but they are generally not seeing it.

From the standpoint of the people working on the fixes, Levin says, it's a category five nightmare.

The technical problems with the website are surely indicative of incompetence, sloppy planning, and the inability of government bureaucracies to do things well, but that's not the most important thing to keep in mind. Levin closes with what is the more important point:

For me, and for other critics of Obamacare, the problem with the law was never about these technical matters. I didn’t think the system wouldn’t work because the government couldn’t build a website, but because the basic health economics involved is deeply misguided and would take the (badly inadequate) American health-financing system in the wrong direction.

So these problems only seem like a prelude to other, larger problems. But Obamacare was also always going to be a test of the sheer capacity of the administrative state to actually do what it claims the authority and ability to do. At this point, it looks as though we may be witnessing a failure of the administrative state on a level unimagined even by its staunchest critics. We may be. But we’ll have to see.

Speaking of category five nightmares, it might be recalled how badly the press and congressional Democrats mauled George Bush for the delay in getting aid to Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a delay that wasn't really his fault. He was scorned and ridiculed by all and sundry on the left for his alleged incompetence. It'll be interesting to see if similar treatment is meted out to President Obama for the way this rollout has been handled. More likely the media, or perhaps Mr. Obama himself, will find a way to blame the failure on Bush or maybe even Ted Cruz.

Word Association

Let's play a word association game: I show you a word and you tell me what words come to mind. Okay, here goes: Tea Party. And you say, what? Well, if you're like many people in the U.S. you're saying things like: Simple-minded, bigots, uneducated, science deniers, etc. That's the portrait our media has assiduously painted of these neanderthals, but comes now a study from a liberal Yale law professor, no less, which debunks the myth.

Kyle Becker at the Independent Journal Review has the story:

Yale Law professor Dan M. Kahan was conducting an analysis of the scientific comprehension of various political groups when he ran into a shocking discovery: tea party supporters are slightly more scientifically literate than the non-tea party population.

Professor Kahan was somewhat taken aback by his results. He says this:

I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension.

But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party. All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the “paper” (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused internet sites like Huffington Post & Politico).

I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.

Well, it's certainly easy to see why, given Kahan's sources of information, his understanding of who the Tea Party people are was out of synch with reality. He's surely not going to get an accurate picture of who they are from reading Huffpo and Politico. Even so, a 2010 New York Times poll found that people who identify ideologically with the Tea Party are wealthier and better educated than the average American, so maybe Kahan shouldn't have been surprised at the results of his survey after all.

Anyway, mischaracterizing conservatives as dunces is an old play in the left's playbook. In fact, that was exactly how they sought to portray both Reagan (an "amiable dunce") and George W. Bush (even though Bush's grades at Yale were better than John Kerry's). Sadly, name-calling and smears often work with those too uninformed to know better.

The Difference Between Them

The Republican leadership, taking fire from all directions, including members of their own party, have run up the white flag of surrender. Lacking the stomach to force even the most modest concessions from the White House, Mitch McConnell in the Senate and John Boehner in the House, simply said "no mas" and threw in the towel on the government shutdown and debt ceiling fights.

The events of the past few weeks press upon one some interesting comparisons between Democrats and Republicans, or at least what are usually called mainstream Republicans. Maybe some of these are a bit unfair, but, if so, not by much. For example:

• For Democrats politics is ultimate fighting. For Republicans its lawn jarts.
• Democrats see Republicans as an enemy to be destroyed. Republicans see Democrats as golf buddies.
• When faced with a battle Democrats close ranks and confront the foe with a united front. When forced into battle, Republicans form a circular firing squad and start shooting anyone who acts on principle.
• Democrats view compromise as "You give me everything I want." Republicans view compromise as "I pretend for a while to refuse to give you everything you want and then I do."
• Democrats are driven by a relentless, inexorable commitment to big government. Republicans are driven by a commitment to not-quite-as-big government.
• Democrats, even their distaff members, see themselves as the alpha males in Washington. Republicans see the Democrats, even their distaff members, as the alpha males in Washington.
• The Democrats' favorite word to Republicans is "no." The Republicans' favorite word to Democrats is "please."
• Democrats see opposition to Obamacare as racist. Republicans see opposition to Obamacare as perfunctory.
• The media represents Democrats as Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and the Easter bunny all rolled into one. The media represents Republicans as the Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Simon Legree all rolled into one.

Here's a prediction. Unless the Republicans soon "man up" there won't be a Republican party to speak of by the year 2020.