Why All This Has Happened

A friend remarked recently that it seems as if we're reliving the conditions that prevailed in 1917 in Russia and 1789 in France and which led to horribly bloody revolutions and crushing oppression..

Our country is being torn apart by thugs and mobs who feel they've nothing to lose, and who are unwittingly aided by police who're too quick to use unnecessary force, politicians who're too reluctant to use necessary force, a media that seems intent on fanning the flames, and a generation of "snowflakes" eager to destroy careers and lives of anyone who transgresses their delicate sensibilities.

Why has this all come upon us? The great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn posed that question during his Templeton address in London in 1983. Why, he asked, were the Russian people visited by the human pestilence that followed in the wake of the Russian revolution, the rise of Joseph Stalin, one of the most horrific butchers ever to disgrace the planet, and the unimaginable terrors the Stalinist communists perpetrated upon the people, first in Russia, then in the broader Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and large swaths of the third world?

Solzhenitsyn said this:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened."

Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

A society which has forgotten God no longer has any basis for objective moral behavior. To paraphrase John Adams, the second president of the U.S., "Our system of government was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

When God goes, so, too, go all moral constraints on the consciences of the people. Sometimes the people don't immediately realize that they're no longer tethered to a moral law, but once they do, murder, destruction, theft and tyranny often follow, at least they did in France and Russia. The masses become ungovernable, tyrants seize power, freedom is quashed, and the people are crushed under the tank treads of their "liberators."

It's a recurrent theme. Plato described it in his Republic 2300 years ago. It happened not only in 18th century France and 20th century Russia, it happened in dozens of other countries, great (China) and small (Cuba), throughout the twentieth century.

The French and Russian revolutions, like most left-wing revolutions, were self-consciously atheistic. Enormous efforts were made to wipe out Christianity, which was seen as the real enemy because the church was the only institution which had, among other things, the standing to compete with the state for peoples' allegiance and the moral authority to condemn the atrocities perpetrated by the French Jacobins and the Russian Stalinists.

In our own time the Christian church is still considered to be the enemy by the left, and for much the same reason. The secular power-brokers in our society have decided that God has no place in our public life and should have scarcely any place in our private life.

Our elites in the media, Hollywood, the courts and the academy have labored assiduously to make Him irrelevant, but what the apostle Paul said of men in his letter to the Galatians applies as well to whole societies: "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."

We are today reaping the fruits of a century or more of attempts to reduce God to a non-entity. Our contemporary urban Jacobins are not interested in dialogue. Some of them would be quite happy to burn our cities to the ground and cart all dissenters off to the guillotine, gulag or firing squad.

The only thing stopping them is their lack of power and that may be a merely temporary limitation.

That may seem too strong, too alarmist, to some readers, but I'm reminded of Elie Wiesel's great book Night in which he recounts the sad tale of many Jewish families who refused to believe that they were in any serious danger from the Nazis. They couldn't imagine the horrors to which they would be subjected in a few short months, they passed on the opportunity to flee and were totally unprepared for the holocaust when it broke upon them.

When people - like the Nazis, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Antifa, etc. - no longer believe that they're accountable to God, when they no longer believe that they have a divinely-imposed duty to love their neighbor and their ideological enemies, then many of them will believe with Lenin that what's moral is whatever promotes the revolution and what's immoral is whatever hinders it.

Once that's granted it follows that anything at all, no matter how ghastly or bestial, is justified if it promotes the goals of those who are willing to burn everything down to create their idea of a new social order.

Luckily, we today have some advantages that the French and Russian people did not. We live in a democratic republic, not an aristocracy, we have an armed citizenry, we have a tradition of freedom, we have a president unlikely to try to appease the anarchists, we have social media that can get truth out to the masses in a timely manner, but we could conceivably lose all of those advantages almost overnight.

Those who consider themselves liberated from the religious superstitions of their grandparents, who are unconstrained by a belief that they're accountable to God for what they do, are waiting for that to happen and actively working to make it happen.

One irony of this, if the experience of the French and Russian radicals should repeat itself, is that those who make it happen will be among the first to find themselves sacrificed to the exigencies of the revolution they created. Leftist revolutions always wind up eating their own.

Shelby Steele

An article at The Federalist discusses an interview that appeared on Fox News with Shelby Steele, an author of several books on race in America and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Steele, who is himself African American, noted that the contemporary civil rights movement under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” was deeply unserious, catering to an old form of victimization that has accomplished nothing to lift up black people.

Here are some of Steele's remarks:

There’s a pathos here. It’s like we’ve done this too many times. We’ve been here too many times, we’ve seen this kind of thing and there’s a big hullabaloo and then it sort of fades away and this is already beginning I think to fade. What was it all about? What was the point? What did these various groups, what did they want?

Striking to me about this particular one is that there was not even a list of demands. Usually there’s always a long, elaborate list of demands. That wasn’t the case here. There’s nothing that you could come away from, this entire episode, the last two weeks or so, that’s meaningful.

Steele denies that our recent social convulsions were really about police reform. He asserted instead that the current generation of young people is a "lost generation." Why they're lost he explains a bit later on in the interview.

In response to Al Sharpton's remarks delivered at George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis, Steele said this:

Al Sharpton is the master of this old form of politics that comes out of the ’60s where we as blacks cry victimization and demand the larger society give us things of some kind or another.

I will take Al Sharpton seriously - I know him, he’s a nice person - I will take his message here seriously when he stands before a congregation like that, of black people in America over a tragic event, and says what black Americans can do to get out of the situation that we’re in.

No one from the president on down anywhere says what role, what’s going wrong with black America?

Why are they so dependent on white America, on the government, that all they can think of is themselves as victims, which of course deflates themselves as human beings, undermines their best energies, their best intentions, and so after 50, 60 years now, past the civil rights bill, we’re worse off in many socioeconomic categories than we were sixty years ago.

Steele went on to explain that this African-American dependency emerged out of white Americans desperately seeking to prove themselves as non-racist.

White Americans live under this accusation that they’re racist. They need to prove that they’re not racist. In order to prove that you’re not racist, you need to take over the fate of black people and say, go with us, we’ll engineer you into the future. We’ll engineer you into equality,” Steele said. “Life doesn’t work like that. We have to engineer ourselves. Period. There is no other way.

This is a trenchant observation. White liberals infantilize blacks while at the same time they exploit them. They infantilize them by encouraging the perception that their problems are beyond their ability to solve, due as they are to an inveterate white racism, and they exploit them by promising to help them in exchange for their vote.

The votes are given, but the help never seems to materialize.

In response to the claim that the protestors do indeed have a list of demands, including defunding the police and reparations, Steele puts his finger directly on the biggest impediment to black achievement and the most salient cause of dysfunction in the black community:

I will take those things seriously when I also hear from Sharpton and others the argument that we need within the black community to work on the institution of marriage. Our families have fallen to pieces. Seventy five percent of all black children are born out of wedlock without a father.

I don’t care how many social programs you have. You’re not going to overcome that.

This is why so many African Americans are what Steele called a lost generation. Fatherlessness is for many young blacks, especially males, is a barrier to advancement almost impossible for all but the fortunate few to surmount, and the fact that so few people on the left are willing to talk about it is the most pernicious expression of racism among whites today.

Steele concludes with this:

We as black Americans need to begin to take our fate back into our own hands, and stop crying racism. There's a little racism out here. there always was and always will be. Why is that an argument to stop, to not move forward, to not be responsible for your own fate?

You can send the police to as many sensitivity training sessions as you want, it's not going to read a story to a child at night before he goes to sleep so he's developing his mind...so he can someday compete in the most advanced society in the modern world.

You can watch the whole interview here.

Meanwhile, at least these two of Steele's books - The Content of Our Character and White Guilt - should be on the summer's reading list of everyone concerned about race relations in America.

Penfield's Conversion to Dualism

Wilder Penfield was a pioneering neurosurgeon at the University of Montreal during the middle decades of the twentieth century who started out holding a materialist view of the brain and mind, but who found himself persuaded by his research to embrace dualism.

Materialists believe that our cognitive experience is solely the product of the material elements of the central nervous system, primarily the brain. Dualists argue that in addition to the material "stuff" of the brain we also have a mind that plays an important role in our thought life.

An article at MindMatters features a transcript of an interview with another neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor, who explains the three findings that caused Penfield to abandon materialism.

Egnor notes that during the course of his surgeries on epileptic patients Penfield could stimulate the brains of the patients, and since the brain doesn't experience pain, the patients were conscious and responsive during the operation.

                                                   Wilder Penfield c. 1958

When Penfield would stimulate different areas of the brain he could get patients to move a limb, or retrieve a memory, but he could never induce a patient to have a thought about an abstract concept like justice or mercy. He was never able to stimulate a patient's reason or intellect.

Here's Egnor:

All the stimulations were concrete things: Move your arm or feel a tingling or even a concrete memory, like you remember your grandmother’s face or something. But there was never any abstract thought stimulated.

And Penfield said hey, if the brain is the source of abstract thought, once in a while, putting an electrical current on some part of the cortex, I ought to get an abstract thought. He never, ever did. So he said that the obvious explanation for that is that abstract thought doesn’t come from the brain.

Penfield also found by studying hundreds of thousands of cases of epileptic seizures that the person never had a seizure that had intellectual content or involved abstract reasoning.

When people have seizures, sometimes they have a generalized seizure. Sometimes they just fall on the ground and go unconscious. Or sometimes they’ll have what’s called a focal seizure where they’ll have a twitching of a finger or a twitching of a limb or they’ll have tingling feeling, the same kind of things that he got when he stimulated the surface of the brain.

But nobody ever had a calculus seizure. Nobody ever had a seizure where they couldn’t stop doing arithmetic. Or couldn’t stop doing logic.

And he said, why is that? If arithmetic and logic and all that abstract thought come from the brain, every once in a while you ought to get a seizure that makes it happen. So he asked rhetorically, why are there no intellectual seizures? His answer was, because the intellect doesn’t come from the brain.

Penfield's third bit of evidence was this:

He would ask people to move their arm during the surgery. So he’d be playing around with their brain. And he’d say. “Whenever you want to, move your right arm.” The person would move their arm.

And, once in a while, he’d stimulate the part of the brain that made the arm move. 

And they moved their arm also when he did that. And then he would ask them, “I want you to tell me when I’m making your arm move and when you’re moving your arm without me making you do it. Tell me if you can tell the difference.” And the patients could always tell the difference.

The patients always knew that when he stimulated their arm, it was him doing it, not them. And when they stimulated their arm, they were doing it, not him. So Penfield said, he couldn’t stimulate the will. He could never trick the patients into thinking it was them doing it. He said, the patients always retained a correct sense of agency. They always knew if they did it or if he did it.

So he said the will was not something he could stimulate, meaning it was not material.

Egnor remarks that these three lines of evidence were dispositive for Penfield. He believed he could not sustain his belief that the brain was the only thing involved in mentation:

So he had three lines of evidence: His inability to stimulate intellectual thought, the inability of seizures to cause intellectual thought, and his inability to stimulate the will. … So he concluded that the intellect and the will are not from the brain.

This is not proof, of course, that materialism is wrong, but it's certainly interesting evidence against it.

The Eye

For about the last century or so Darwinian naturalists have cited the eye's design as evidence against the existence of an intelligent designer. This is surprising because the eye is an exquisitely engineered organ, but the argument of the Darwinians has been that there are several design flaws in the eye's structure that any competent engineer would have avoided. 

One of the alleged flaws is that the rod and cone cells in the retina face backward rather than forward which would seem to minimize the amount of light that reaches them. As such, the eye seems to reflect sub-optimal engineering, and, the argument goes, since sub-optimal structures are what we would expect given that naturalistic evolution is a blind, rather haphazard process, they're the very opposite of what we would expect were the structure intelligently constructed by a competent designer.

As the short video below illustrates, however, the backward facing cells are actually an ingenious way to optimize vision and not a defective design at all.

The video also makes short work of the claim that complex eyes evolved over very long periods of evolutionary time by numerous successive short steps. In fact, the very earliest eyes found in the fossil record are just as complex as are the eyes found in organisms today. If eyes did evolve the process must have been very rapid and thus, it's reasonable to suspect, somehow intelligently directed.

Indeed, the only basis there can be for ruling out an intelligent agent guiding the process is an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, but why privilege naturalism in such a way if there's evidence to suggest it may be wrong? Yet people do it all the time as this famous quote from geneticist Richard Lewontin reveals:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism [i.e. naturalism].

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

As Lewontin's declaration of fealty to naturalism illustrates, it's not science as such that conflicts with the notion of intelligent agency at work in biology. The conflict is one between two metaphysical worldviews, naturalism and theism. Lewontin is acknowledging that his choice to embrace naturalism is a subjective philosophical preference, a preference akin to a personal taste and not based on any empirical evidence at all. He embraces naturalism for no reason other than that he has a deep metaphysical, and perhaps psychological, aversion to theism. 

Anyway, give the video a look:

Post-Death Experiences

Near Death Experiences (NDEs), or what should probably be called "After Death Experiences," are becoming much better documented and much harder for those inclined to do so to ignore. Something is happening, but the question is, what?

NDEs are problematic for both Christians and materialists. They're a problem for some Christians because although they point to the existence of the self after physical death - a state of affairs that reinforces a belief Christians also hold - many of the details of what persons who've experienced these episodes relate do not conform to traditional Christian beliefs about that existence.

They're problematic for materialists because materialists believe that all we are is our physical, material selves and when we die our self is extinguished. If it is the case that our existence continues after the death of the body it would be a fact completely incompatible with materialism.

Thus, if these are genuine after death phenomena some Christians may have to adjust their thinking on the afterlife, but materialists would have to give up their belief in materialism altogether.

A recent article at Mind Matters discusses an article on NDEs which appeared in a recent issue of Scientific American. The author, a neuroscientist named Christof Koch, acknowledges that people who report these experiences are reporting something genuine. They're not fabricating the accounts, but Koch, being a materialist seeks a materialistic explanation for them.

The author of the Mind Matters article is Michael Egnor, also a neurosurgeon. Egnor writes that,

Koch points out that NDEs share common characteristics across individuals, cultures, and historical eras—freedom from pain, traveling down a tunnel to a light, an intense sense of peace, seeing loved ones, experiencing a life review, and having an unusual sense of time and space. These experiences are also remembered with unusual intensity. To the person who experiences them, they seem “realer than real”—and they often fundamentally change the person’s outlook on life.

It is when Koch addresses some of the neuroscience attempts to explain NDEs that his discussion goes off the rails. The number and variety of the materialist theories he describes counts against their veracity—it conveys more of a sense of groping for any plausible materialist explanation than of sober scientific investigation.

For example, he points out that NDEs are no more likely to occur in people with religious beliefs and beliefs in the afterlife than in people who lack those beliefs. But, far from undermining the significance of NDEs, that finding supports the view that they are not mere confirmation bias toward existing beliefs during a traumatic experience.

Egnor is right about this. If NDEs were, in fact, a real post-death experience of an afterlife we would expect that one's religious beliefs would have nothing to do with whether one experienced it or not.
Egnor then challenges Koch's explanation of what causes the NDE in the dying or dead person:

In an attempt to account for NDEs in a fully materialist way, Koch ascribes many of them to “power outages” in the cerebral cortex during the dying process. 

This is an implausible account for two reasons. First, a sizeable portion (around 20% in many studies) of NDEs are correlated with perceptions and knowledge that could not have been obtained via conventional means. A famous example in the neurosurgical community is that of Pamela Reynolds, who had an out-of-body NDE during cardiac arrest associated with aneurysm surgery. 

Afterwards, she remembered watching her own operation while her heart was stopped and she could recount precise details of events during her surgery that she could not possibly have known unless she had actually seen them.

Hers is not the only example of an out-of-body experience that is inexplicable in materialist terms. One of my colleagues encountered a young child who had complex skull surgery who described his own operation in meticulous visual detail, despite being under general anesthesia and having his eyes and face covered during the procedure.

The technical details of the surgical procedure were idiosyncratic to that neurosurgeon; information was not publicly available and was not described to the family or the child in the kind of detail that the child reported seeing. The family was so shocked by their child’s awareness of the details that they asked why my colleague hadn’t used anesthesia for the surgery! 

There are many such examples of NDEs where details of accounts could be correlated, which of course cannot be explained by the “power outage” theory.

One of the most remarkable accounts I ever came across was of a Seattle woman named Vicki Noratuk who was totally blind from birth. Noratuk was "killed" in an automobile accident and yet was able to accurately report what happened to her in the hospital and even to describe seeing color which she had never seen in her life. She was resuscitated but never regained her sight. She tells her story in this video.

Egnor continues his critique of Koch's explanation for NDEs:

The second reason that Koch’s “power outage” theory fails is more mundane. The usual consequences of brain hypoxia and hypoperfusion are very well understood and they invariably entail confusion, diminished sensations, loss of memory, etc..

All of these experiences are antithetical to NDEs, which are characterized by stunning clarity, inexplicable knowledge, and lifelong memory of the events. NDEs improve awareness and understanding, which is utterly unlike brain hypoxia and brain damage.

Other materialist explanations for NDEs fail in much the same way. While drug intoxication, seizures, uncontrolled release of neurotransmitters, and the like may have some superficial resemblances to NDEs, all of them utterly fail to capture the whole phenomenon. NDEs are radically different from any mental experience caused by brain impairment.

There's more in the Mind Matters article that anyone interested in NDEs should read. It's a fascinating subject.

A Contingent World

Several years ago cosmologists Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes wrote an excellent book titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Universe which describes the amazingly delicate settings of the constants, parameters and forces that comprise the structure of our cosmos. 

Having enjoyed the book I was pleased to come across an article by Lewis in Cosmos Magazine which serves as a pretty good summary of A Fortunate Universe. One statement in the article, however, was problematic, and I'd like to address it. 

Before I do, though, here's the lede from the article:

For more than 400 years, physicists treated the universe like a machine, taking it apart to see how it ticks. The surprise is it turns out to have remarkably few parts: just leptons and quarks and four fundamental forces to glue them together.

But those few parts are exquisitely machined. If we tinker with their settings, even slightly, the universe as we know it would cease to exist. Science now faces the question of why the universe appears to have been “fine-tuned” to allow the appearance of complex life, a question that has some potentially uncomfortable answers.

Lewis then goes on to discuss several interesting ways in which this fine-tuning manifests itself and follows up with this:

Examining the huge number of potential universes, each with their own unique laws of physics, leads to a startling conclusion: most of the universes that result from fiddling with the fundamental constants would lack physical properties needed to support complex life.

While this is a scientific article, we cannot ignore the fact that to many, the fact that the universe is finely tuned for intelligent life shows the hand of the creator who set the dials. But this answer, of course, leads to another question: who created the creator? Let’s see what alternatives science can offer.

But then he dashes off to talk about multiverses and grand simulations without even trying to answer the query he has raised, as if the designer hypothesis has been disposed of simply by posing the question. In fact, there are a number of ways to answer it as well as answering Lewis' apparent assumption that the question "who created the creator?" is itself an adequate refutation of the design hypothesis.

One response is to note that the universe can be thought of as the sum of all contingent entities (a contingent entity is anything which could possibly not exist and whose existence depends upon something else. You and I are contingent, as is the earth and, indeed, the cosmos itself). 

That being so, there must be a cause of the universe that is non-contingent otherwise the cause would be dependent upon something else and would itself be contingent and thus part of the universe. This would mean that the universe would be the cause of itself which is metaphysically absurd. 

Now a cause that is non-contingent is necessary. It doesn't depend upon anything else for its existence. Thus Lewis' question, what caused the creator, is philosophically ill-conceived. The creator of all contingent things must itself be uncaused.

Moreover, the design hypothesis asserts that the universe has a sufficient cause. Once the skeptic grants that the universe has a cause, even if, in defiance of Occam's razor, he wants to suggest the possibility of an infinity of such causes, he has pretty much conceded that the design hypothesis is correct.

Anyway, here's a short video on the contingency argument as developed by 17th century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz:

 

P.S. There's a typo in Lewis' article that those who read it should be aware of. The article says that string theory allows for the existence of 10,500 different universes. The number should be 10^500 universes (i.e. a one with 500 zeros after it). It makes a big difference. Those interested in the fine-tuning of the universe should read the whole article as Lewis provides a good overview of the contemporary issues involved.

Drink the Kool-Aid

An essay by Chad Sanders could easily be ignored as the ranting of a narcissistic crank were it not published as an op-ed in the prestigious New York Times last Friday. John Sexton at Hot Air.com tells us that Mr. Sanders' column, titled “I Don’t Need ‘Love’ Texts From My White Friends.” opens with these words: “My book is coming out in a few months, and I don’t know if I’m going to be alive to see it, because I’m a black man.”

Mr. Sanders wishes us to know two things. One, he has a book coming out and two, his life is in serious danger because he's black. I don't know where he thinks the threat to his life comes from, but if he thinks it comes from racist whites he's delusional. Statistically speaking, he has a far greater chance of having his life ended by another black man than he does by a white person, police officer or otherwise.

Sexton continues:

That combination of humble-bragging and self-pity gets repeated for a dozen or more paragraphs with the author repeatedly saying he’s tired of white friends texting to express their support which he sees as just a way to express guilt. 

Actually, this is one point on which I find myself somewhat agreeing with Sanders. Liberal whites are often so eager to be granted absolution by a black person for the sin of being born white that they'll engage in the most obsequious groveling as penance. The behavior is demeaning to the white person and insulting to the black person who is, in fact, often treated as if he/she were a child.

Anyway, Sexton goes on:

[Sanders] doesn’t want them to say they care about him as a person, he wants them to do something practical for the cause. And one of the things he recommends is to text their relatives and let them know they are being cut off socially and emotionally unless and until those relatives show support for “black lives.” [emphasis added].

Here's Sanders' text:

So please, stop sending #love. Stop sending positive vibes. Stop sending your thoughts. Here are three suggestions on more immediately impactful things to offer instead:

Money: To funds that pay legal fees for black people who are unjustly arrested, imprisoned or killed or to black politicians running for office.
Texts: To your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.[emphasis added]
Protection: To fellow black protesters who are at greater risk of harm during demonstrations.

Yes, these actions may seem grave. But you insist that you love me, and love requires sacrifice. Text messages are unlimited on most data plans. Emojis are not sacrificial.

Sexton quotes Quillette editor Jonathan Kay as pointing out in a tweet that this is exactly the sort of demand that cult leaders impose upon their followers:

"only ppl I've seen who demand that you cut off relationships with family are either religious nuts seeking to punish family apostates, gender crazies on tumblr videos telling autistic girls to cut off body parts & run away from home, Scientologists... And this author [i.e. Sanders]. All cults."

Sexton adds these observations:

Kay's not wrong. This is exactly the kind of thing Scientology does, requiring those inside the cult to cut themselves off from those outside, even close family members. In fact, in Scientology those on the inside are denounced for failing to distance themselves from friends and family who aren’t supportive.

Even apart from the cultic nature of this, it should strike people as obviously wrong. The author isn’t recommending an appeal based on reason or empathy, he jumps directly to emotional blackmail. It would have been one thing if he’d merely said, ‘talk to your friends about why this matters.’ But he’s gone beyond that to saying anyone who really cares should demand compliance. 

The creepiest part is his justification of this demand, i.e. “love requires sacrifice.” If you love me, you’ll sacrifice your relationship with your friends and parents.

This is the point at which adults should suddenly realize they’ve been asked to join a cult and should tell author Chad Sanders they aren’t interested in his “friendship.” 

Seriously, have any of your friends ever told you to cut yourself off from your own parents? What would you say to them if they tried it?

This author is so self-involved he doesn’t seem to spare a thought for anyone else. Imagine being an elderly parent or grandparent whose child calls to say that they’ve decided they can’t speak to you again unless you send money to Black Lives Matter or go out in the midst of a pandemic to join a march. The author doesn’t even hesitate.

He’s far more concerned about the vanishingly small possibility that he’ll be murdered (before his book comes out).

As horrid as all this sounds it's not all that unusual on the left. In fact, it's the way leftists have always viewed allegiance to their cause - absolute conformity to the party line or total excommunication.

 
It's very much the way twentieth century communist totalitarians treated "deviationists." No one was allowed to dissent in even the smallest degree from the doctrines handed down by the party elites on pain of banishment to Siberia or the firing squad. Indeed, the only thing that prevents contemporary leftists from destroying anyone who disagrees with them, whether family or former friends, is their lack, for now, of the power to do so.

Nevertheless, attempts to achieve "ideological purity" are all over university campuses and social media. No matter who you are, if you refuse to toe the line laid down by the bullies, you'll be fired, cancelled, censored, censured and turned into a pariah or non-person.

 
Parents, siblings and friends must either drink the ideological Kool-aid themselves or they're dead to those they love.

What an awful testimony to what happens to people when they make their ideology their religion.

Some Thoughts on the Recent Troubles

There've been numerous demands for justice this past week, a circumstance which is not a little ironic. 

After all, we live in a society that has made it clear that there's to be no mixing of religious belief with public policy, but a society simply can't say, at least not rationally, that we don't want God but we do want justice.  

Calls for justice are empty in a secular society which sees human beings as little more than an evolutionary product of the struggle for survival. We're told that we're just animals, "naked apes," but where is there justice among animals? What makes our sense of justice an objective moral imperative rather than a mere illusion? 

Justice as we understand it, and as it's being demanded in the streets, is an artifact left over from our Judeo-Christian heritage. Secularism has no basis for it. Justice in the absence of God is simply whatever the strong can impose on the weak. For justice to exist, objective morality has to exist  (i.e. some things, like harming the innocent, have to be objectively wrong) and for objective morality to exist God has to exist. 

Calls for justice coming from those who stand in the Christian tradition, like Martin Luther King, have resonance. Those who demand justice based on a secular understanding of the world, however, are either hypocritically piggy-backing on the Christian tradition they reject or they're just shouting meaningless slogans as a form of public virtue-preening.

Clamorings to abolish or defund the police are also emanating from the protest marches.  Here's a suggestion: Why not establish police-free zones, like urban enterprise zones, in those neighborhoods where the police are most resented? Neighborhoods can democratically decide whether they want a police presence or not.  

This would be a disaster, of course, for the people in those neighborhoods; businesses would flee and gangs would take over, but at least there'd be no cops around risking their lives to protect people who don't want their protection. And it'd allow the corrupt city politicians to pocket more taxpayer money that would've otherwise gone to funding the police.

It sounds like a good idea, and I don't know why it hasn't actually been tried before.

Another thought: Maybe I'm too cynical, but watching the memorials honoring George Floyd, I have to wonder how many of the "mourners," aside from his family, really care about George Floyd the man. After all, we certainly don't see such an outpouring of grief over the deaths of any of the other thousands of black men murdered every year. Why not?

Most people probably care more about what Floyd's death symbolizes, so wouldn't it be more appropriate to honor instead all the innocent victims, living and dead, of police recklessness, brutality and malfeasance? This would be a much more meaningful observance as it would encompass all those who've had their lives unjustly devastated by law enforcement in this country, but that would, of course, include Michael Flynn so there probably won't be an upswell of support for this idea from the mainstream media.

The governors and mayors of the states and cities hardest hit by the violence and unrest are assuring us that the inequities and  racism that led to the death of George Floyd and the deaths of fifteen others during the riots, as well as the huge property losses, cannot be allowed to continue. They're going to "bring about change," they're going to "eliminate systemic racism," but what, exactly, does any of that actually mean? 

Does it mean "reparations"? Perhaps it means that where minorities are underrepresented more will be hired. Perhaps it means more affirmative action. 

Are there too few blacks in physics, astronomy, engineering and neurosurgery? No problem, just lower the standards and hire more. 

Are there too few whites in the NBA and NFL? No problem, just lower the standards and hire more. (Well, maybe we need to tap the brakes on that one. We don't want to overdo our attempt to achieve racial equity. After all, some racial inequities are more acceptable than others, just like some reasons for flouting social distancing are more acceptable than others.).

Are there too many members of one race committing a particular kind of crime, such as whites committing white-collar crimes and blacks committing street crimes?  No problem, just legalize the crime and, poof, the inequities are gone. What could be easier?

Here's another irony.  Most of  the states and cities that have suffered severely from the late unrest have been governed for decades by liberal Democrats, and, in the case of the mayors, many of them are African American. Why have these politicians just now awakened to the need to "do something" and why do the people so often victimized by the inequities they live with every day continue to vote for the same party every election that has done nothing to meliorate their suffering? 

What has electing Democrats done to change the prospects of those citizens living in our poorest neighborhoods? Every election season they talk about change, but for the poor in Democrat run cities and states nothing ever seems to change.

A final thought: Minnesota's Attorney General, Keith Ellison, a black liberal Democrat, as it happens, has decided to push all his chips onto the table by charging former officer Derek Chauvin with second degree homicide in the death of George Floyd and charge the other three former cops with aiding and abetting second degree homicide. 

I don't know who's advising Ellison, but in order to convict on a charge of second degree homicide in Minnesota you have to prove an intent to kill or prove that the death occurred during the commision of a felony. It's hard to see how it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt either that Chauvin actually intended to kill Floyd or that in subduing him he was committing a felony, but that's what Ellison has chosen to base his case on. 

Aiding and abetting is defined as occurring when a person is criminally liable for a crime committed by another if the person intentionally aids, advises, hires, counsels, or conspires with or otherwise procures the other to commit the crime. It's not clear that the other three officers did any of these things. The most they could be convicted of, it seems, would be negligent homicide because they stood by and did nothing to stop Chauvin.

But that's not the route Ellison has chosen to take. 

So imagine what'll happen now in cities across this country if the state of Minnesota fails, as seems quite possible, to make its case, and all four officers are acquitted. 

Heaven help us.

Are Black Men Really Being Hunted?

Of all the stupidities dished out to us by the media in the last week, surely among the most fatuous was a comment by MSNBC's Joy Reid that black men are "being hunted" in America. Is that true? What's the evidence for such an otherwise irresponsible and inflammatory remark?

According to former federal prosecutor Andrew Mccarthy at National Review there's no evidence at all. He points out that, contrary to the impression given by the media, about twice as many white people as black people are killed by police. In fact, in about 75 percent of police shootings, the decedent is not black.

He writes:

Take the website statista.com, specifically its breathless focus on “Hate crime in the United States” — counterfactually insinuating that any shooting involving a black victim must be a “hate crime.” 

Here’s their big headline from Tuesday: “Black Americans 2.5X More Likely Than Whites to Be Killed By Police.” It is fiction. It is sheer demagoguery, peddled as American cities are besieged by rioters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. 

The falsity of the claim is demonstrated even by statista.com itself. Just three days ago, the site posted another series of bar graphs, showing that, in fact, whites are nearly twice as likely as blacks to be shot to death by police. Here are the numbers:

Year                White  Black

2017                457      223

2018                399      209

2019                370      235

2020 (so far)      42       31

But what about the objection that although blacks make up only a quarter of the total number of people killed in police shootings annually, African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population so the killings are disproportionate to the size of the African American population?

McCarthy points out that black men are more likely to be the victims of police killings because violent confrontations with police occur most often in areas where violent crime is high.

While African Americans are involved in two times more police shootings than their percentage of the population would seem to warrant, they commit 53 percent of murders and 60 percent of robberies — well over four times their percentage of the population. 

Moreover, if violence by one race against another is evidence of racism, or "hunting," then violent interracial crime should be an indicator of where the racism lies. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations, excluding interracial homicide. As for interracial homicide,

Seventy percent of black-white interracial homicides are committed by blacks, according to the FBI crime statistics for 2016. They show that, of 776 black–white homicides, blacks committed 533 and whites 243.

Parenthetically, these numbers are dwarfed by the number of blacks killed by other blacks in 2018 (7407).

McCarthy concludes that, "The false narrative of racist police, which pressures law enforcement to back off from the communities most victimized by crime, is now destroying entire cities."

But even if there was justification for shooting many of those armed and violent offenders, George Floyd and others were unarmed. Do police kill unarmed blacks at a higher rate than unarmed whites? Here's McCarthy:

Let’s consider unarmed people killed in such encounters. Such unarmed decedents, too, were twice as likely to be white as black in 2019 — i.e., 19 unarmed whites, nine unarmed blacks.

The number of unarmed black men killed by police is vanishingly small....there were 7,407 black homicide victims in the United States in 2018, the last year for which final numbers are available. Assuming a comparable number in 2019, the nine unarmed men killed in police shootings would represent just 0.1 percent of black homicides.

In stark contrast ...a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

Television talk host Tucker Carlson adds a bit more perspective to those nine unarmed blacks (eight men, one woman) killed by police in 2019. After discussing the circumstances surrounding the deaths of each one he summarizes them by noting that in five of the cases the unarmed man attacked the officer, with one of those killings being accidental, and in two of the remaining four cases the officer was criminally charged.

Carlson concludes:

Is it possible that more of these officers should have been charged? Of course it’s possible. Justice is not always served, that’s for sure. But either way, this is a very small number in a country of 325 million people. This is not genocide. It’s not even close to genocide. It is laughable to suggest it is.

In fact last year was the safest year for unarmed suspects since The Washington Post began tracking police shootings. It was the safest year for both white and black suspects.

Meanwhile, he comments, the U.S. “remains a dangerous place for police officers,” with forty-eight “murdered in 2019,” more than all “unarmed suspects killed, of all races.”

Finally, Carlson ended by citing the 7,407 black Americans who were murdered in the U.S. in 2018. If those numbers continue “on a similar trajectory,” it would mean that “for every unarmed black person shot to death by police, more than 700 were murdered by someone else.”

Most often another black man. The idea that blacks are being hunted by whites or white cops, or that there's a racial genocide taking place, is a media fantasy embraced by those too lazy or too mentally incompetent to objectively examine the evidence.

A proper response of all honest people of good will, black and white, would be to ignore whoever tries - while either omitting or skewing the data - to perpetuate that pernicious lie.

Why Woodpeckers Don't Get Concussions

Watching a Red-bellied woodpecker in my back yard today reminded me of this post from a few years ago:

According to an essay in The Federalist,

The average woodpecker hits its beak against a tree at an estimated 15 miles an hour, 20 times per second, about 12,000 times a day. According to physicists, for the bird, that is an equivalent of coming to a complete stop every second from 26,000 miles per hour. This happens every day over the woodpecker’s lifespan. In g-force—the force exerted using mass, weight, acceleration, and gravity—a woodpecker can withstand 1,200 g. Yet the birds do not suffer any head injuries or brain trauma.

In comparison, the average National Football League hit has two players colliding between 100 to 150 g, often experiencing concussions that register when impact reaches 80 to 100 g. How then, is it possible that a tiny bird can withstand ten times the impact as a human...?

Well, Matt Soniak at Mental Floss has an answer to that question. I've borrowed some of it here: 

First, a woodpecker’s skull is built to absorb shock and minimize damage. The bone that surrounds the brain is thick and spongy, and loaded with trabeculae, microscopic beam-like bits of bone that form a tightly woven “mesh” for support and protection. On their scans, the scientists found that this spongy bone is unevenly distributed in woodpeckers, and it is concentrated around the forehead and the back of the skull, where it could act as a shock absorber.

Woodpeckers' hyoid bones act as additional support structures. In humans, the horseshoe-shaped hyoid is an attachment site for certain throat and tongue muscles. Woodpeckers’ hyoids do the same job, but they’re much larger and are differently shaped. The ends of the “horseshoe” wrap all the way around the skull and, in some species, even around the eye socket or into the nasal cavity, eventually meeting to form a sort of sling shape. This bizarre-looking bone, the researchers think, acts like a safety harness for the woodpecker’s skull, absorbing shock stress and keeping it from shaking, rattling and rolling with each peck.

Inside the skull, the brain has its own defenses. It’s small and smooth, and is positioned in a tight space with its largest surface pointing towards the front of the skull. It doesn’t move around too much, and when it does collide with the skull, the force is spread out over a larger area. This makes it more resistant to concussions, the researchers say.

A woodpecker’s beak helps prevent trauma, too. The outer tissue layer of its upper beak is longer than the lower beak, creating a kind of overbite, and the bone structure of the lower beak is longer and stronger than the upper one. The researchers think that the uneven build diverts impact stress away from the brain and distributes it to the lower beak and bottom parts of the skull instead.

The woodpecker’s anatomy doesn’t just prevent injuries to the brain, but also its eyes. Other research using high-speed recordings has shown that, in the fraction of a second just before their beaks strike wood, woodpeckers’ thick nictitans—membranes beneath the lower lid of their eyes, sometimes called the “third eyelid”—close over the eyes. This protects them from debris and keeps them in place. They act like seatbelts, says ophthalmologist Ivan Schwab, author of Evolution's Witness: How Eyes Evolved, and they keep the retina from tearing and the eye from popping right out of the skull.

There’s also a behavioral aspect to the damage control. The researchers found that woodpeckers are pretty good at varying the paths of their pecks. By moving their heads and beaks around as they hammer away, they minimize the number of times in a row that the brain and skull make contact at the same point. Older research also showed that the strike trajectories, as much as they vary, are always almost linear. There’s very little, if any, rotation of the head and almost no movement immediately after impact, minimizing twisting force that could cause injury.

                                                         Lewis' Woodpecker

 

Very interesting, but I have a question for Matt. Early on in his piece on woodpecker adaptations he says this: 

In an average day, a woodpecker does this [bangs its head against a tree] around 12,000 times, and yet they don’t seem to hurt themselves or be the least bit bothered by it. This is because, after millions of years of this type of behavior, they’ve evolved some specialized headgear to prevent injuries to their heads, brains, and eyes.

My question is how did they survive for millions of years before the requisite anatomical equipment evolved? Imagine primitive human beings coming to think that banging their heads against a brick wall will somehow help them find food. It would seem that they'd all quickly give up the behavior or else go extinct long before they evolved the cranial structures to mitigate the damage they were doing to themselves. 

That woodpeckers have obviously not gone extinct, that they've evolved all these marvelous adaptations through sheer blind luck, is testimony to the stupefyingly miraculous powers and wonders of sheer chance. Or God.

God and Evolution

I was recently asked to write a brief summary of my views on evolution and God for a group of well-educated twenty-somethings who knew a little about evolution but not muich about God. I quickly realized that mine was not an easy assignment. Nevertheless, I thought I'd share my answer with readers of VP. 

Here's what I wrote: 

 The word "evolution" is very slippery. It means different things in different contexts. When people talk about evolution in the sense of being an impediment to belief in God they're usually talking about Darwin's theory (or what's actually called Neo-Darwinian evolution). According to this theory, natural processes, primarily genetic mutation and natural selection, have produced from a single primitive cell all the diversity of plants, animals and protists that we see in today's world. 

Some people believe this is what happened but that God somehow guided the process. Others believe the process had no need for God. 

There's a whole spectrum of views on this topic from special creationists who believe that God created all the basic kinds (generally at the level of class or family) of organisms in seven days as recorded in Genesis to theistic evolutionists who believe that God created the laws that led to life and subsequent evolution, but that the evolutionary process happened independently of God, to naturalistic (Darwinian) evolutionists who believe God, if He exists, played no role at all in the development of life (The word "naturalism" in this context refers to the belief that nature is all there is. There's no supernatural God, or if there is He doesn't interfere in the universe. Naturalism is essentially a synonym for atheism.). 

The view that I identify with is called Intelligent Design. This view says that however the universe and life came to be, however long ago it happened, it was not a solely naturalistic process. It was guided by an intelligent agent, and that there's evidence of the activity of this agent throughout both the physical universe (watch this short video on water, for example) as well as the realm of living things (the biosphere). 

There are lots of problems with naturalistic evolution (NE). It has great difficulty explaining things like the evolution of butterfly metamorphosis, the evolution of beauty, the development of language in humans, the origin of consciousness, the evolution of enucleation in red blood cells, the evolution of sexual reproduction from asexual reproduction, the evolution of memory, the evolution of irreducibly complex biological machines within the cell, and much more. 

 But the biggest problem NE has is with the origin of life (OOL) itself. Until there is a living, reproducing cell there can be no genetic mutations and thus no natural selection. So, how did that first cell arise, complete with the molecular machinery - DNA, RNA and a suite of about 100 proteins - necessary for the cell to make copies of itself? 

This has proven to be an intractable problem. Here's just one part of the problem: In order for DNA to make the proteins necessary for the functioning of the cell it needs the help of those proteins, but those proteins first must be made by the DNA which needs the help of the proteins before it can make them. No one has ever been able to solve this problem of how the DNA could make those proteins without those proteins yet being in existence. 

That's just one problem with the OOL. Another problem is that it's extraordinarily improbable that a useful protein could be assembled by a random series of amino acids. If you'd like to see what I mean by this check out this post and video on Viewpoint. 

The biggest problem for any naturalistic explanation of the OOL, though, is this: Proteins and DNA are information-rich. That is, they're like a code or letters or words in a paragraph. They contain and convey information, but nowhere in the universe do we ever find information that has not been produced by a mind. 

Blind, purposeless natural processes cannot produce information. If barrels-full of scrabble letters were poured out on a gym floor at a rate of a million barrels per second for a billion years you'd never get one of the barrels to produce the text of this post or the first chapter of War and Peace. 

We always attribute the information in books, or in a computer program, or anywhere else we find it, to a mind. Well, even the most primitive cell contains an entire library of information, so where did that information come from? 

It's much more reasonable, it seems to me, to believe that the information contained in the cell was produced by a mind than that it's the random, accidental product of blind nature. Nature is simply incapable of producing information of any significant level of complexity.

And, taking it one step further, any mind capable of producing the incredibly complex organisms we see in our world must be unimaginably intelligent and inconceivably powerful. In other words, it must be very much like the traditional concept of God.

Institutional Racism

In the wake of the urban riots sweeping our country the terms "institutional" or "structural" racism have been frequently invoked and talked about as if there's simply no doubt that they exist. Perhaps they do, but the problem is that the claim is meaningless because there's no way to falsify it. 

Ask yourself this question: What state of affairs would have to exist to demonstrate to the satisfaction of most reasonable people that there was no institutional racism in this country? In what empirically demonstrable ways would the country look different if there were no institutional racism?

It seems extremely difficult to give a cogent answer to those questions. One common attempt is to point to racial inequities in society and to assert that if there were no institutional racism there'd be no racial disparities, but that doesn't work. There could be a host of reasons for those inequities that have nothing to do with racism. 

Even so, in recent days people point to the number of blacks that are killed by police officers as an illustration of the racism afflicting our police departments, and argue that were there no institutional racism police wouldn't be killing blacks with such frequency. 

The problem with this argument is that the statistics don't support it.  A study by Yale law school researchers found that there was no racial disparity in the use of lethal force by police. They wrote that "on the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls." 

There is, however, a caveat here that I'll address in a moment, but first statistics published by the Washington Post (paywall) provide some detail. 

According to the Post since January 01, 2015, 4,728 people have died in police shootings. About half of these (2,385), were white, and about a quarter (1,252), were black, the rest were Hispanic (877) and other racial groups (214). So, in absolute numbers police kill almost twice as many whites as they do blacks, but it doesn't serve the progressive media's apparent desire to create racial conflict in this country by publicizing the deaths of white victims at the hands of police so most people never hear about these incidents. 

Furthermore, nine unarmed black persons were shot and killed by police last year whereas nineteen unarmed whites met their deaths by being shot by police. That shows that police are sometimes guilty of horrendous abuse, but it doesn't show that they're guilty of racism.

The Post goes on, however, to qualify their data: 

As a share of the population, though, things are very different. Black Americans account for less than 13% of the U.S. population but the rate at which they are shot and killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans. 

In other words, blacks are about 13% of the population but about 25% of those killed by police, whereas whites, who comprise about 60% of the population, make up 50% of the deaths at the hands of police.

Thus, as a percentage of the population blacks are indeed killed at a higher rate than whites. This is important, but we can't conclude from it that it demonstrates racism. Indeed, it's certainly possible that racism is the reason for the disparity, but there are many other factors that could result in these numbers.

For example, blacks tend to live in areas of high crime and violence, whites don't. The fact that police officers in urban areas are more likely to encounter violent men and are more likely to be under greater stress from their day-to-day responsibilities is at least as likely an explanation for the disparity as is racism. 

This may also explain a significant finding by the Yale study mentioned above. The researchers did find racial differences in the level of non-lethal force used by police: 

On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force, even after accounting for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction. 

Interestingly, as use of force increases from putting hands on a civilian to striking them with a baton, the overall probability of such an incident occurring decreases dramatically but the racial difference remains roughly constant. Even when officers report civilians have been compliant and no arrest was made, blacks are 21.3 (0.04) percent more likely to endure some form of force. 

But it must be emphasized that racial differences are not necessarily evidence of racism. Again, it may be that an officer working in a high crime neighborhood is, because of stress, or even fear, prone to use physical force preemptively. 

Such use of force may be completely unwarranted, it may show a need for more and better training or removal from the force, but it's not necessarily an indication of systemic or institutional racism. 

Moreover, there was no mention in this study, at least that I saw, of the race of the police officers. Black officers using unnecessary force against black suspects would comprise a portion of the WaPo's statistics, but it'd be quite a stretch to attribute their abuse to racism.

My point is that we're much too uncritical in our acceptance of the idea, incessantly promoted by our media and politicians, that our society is thoroughly racist. People believe this because they want to believe it or because, like the crowd watching the emperor parade by stark naked, they don't want to be thought to be out of touch so they succumb to peer pressure. 

Whatever the reason, the evidence, at least insofar as the law enforcement institution is being considered, is simply not sufficient to support the conclusion that it's infected by systemic racism. 

As I wrote in Monday's post our promiscuous resort to racism as the explanation for every disparity between the races is unhelpful and counterproductive.

One Cause of Racial Inequality

Amidst the turmoil in our cities this week a number of folks in the media commentariat have opined that the violence we see is only superficially about the killing of George Floyd and more substantively a consequence of the dire inequalities that exist in this country between whites and blacks and the frustrations those inequalities entail.

Well, maybe. But why do those inequalities exist in the first place? One reason is surely the miserable education that, for whatever reason, most residents of our inner cities acquire. The following is an older post, but things evidently have not changed much since it was written.

An article at CNS News offers some dismal statistics about the state of education in America's cities. In Detroit for example,

Ninety six percent of eighth graders are not proficient in mathematics and 93 percent are not proficient in reading. Only 4 percent of Detroit public school eighth graders are proficient or better in math and only 7 percent in reading.

Why is this? Is it because not enough money is being spent on education? Evidently not:

This is despite the fact that in the 2011-2012 school year—the latest for which the Department of Education has reported the financial data—the Detroit public schools had “total expenditures” of $18,361 per student and “current expenditures” of $13,330 per student.

According to data published by the Detroit Public Schools, the school district’s operating expenses in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2014 amounted to approximately $14,743 per student.

The depressing statistics are only marginally better nationwide, but they're especially bad in urban districts. Less than fifty percent of eighth grade students in twenty one major cities are proficient in reading:

In reading, the Cleveland public schools were next to last among the large urban school districts with only 11 percent scoring proficient or better. Baltimore and Fresno were tied for third worst with only 13 percent scoring proficient or better; and Philadelphia ranked fifth worst with only 16 percent scoring proficient or better.

The Cleveland public schools also ranked next to last in math, with only 9 percent of eight graders scoring proficient or better. Baltimore and Fresno were also tied for third worst in math, with only 12 percent scoring proficient or better; and Los Angeles ranked fifth worst with 15 percent scoring proficient or better in math.

This education gap is doubtless the proximal cause of the income gap that distresses so many observers.

When so few young people are able to read well or do basic math those youngsters face a very bleak future. They're poorly prepared to enter a workforce that requires basic intellectual skills in order to succeed economically. It's simply commonsense that those with reading and math competency are going to command higher incomes than those whose education suits them for little more than manual labor, and that the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to grow wider as society becomes less dependent upon manual labor and more dependent upon technical skill.

But why are so many of these kids failing? Are their schools terrible? Are their families and neighborhoods dysfunctional and chaotic? Are they unmotivated and uneducable? Or is it some combination of these? Whatever the case, when Democrats complain about income inequality they should be asked why their party, which runs every one of our major cities, and has controlled them for fifty years, hasn't been able to fix the problem, and why we should think that re-electing them would make things any better.

Our Racism Fixation Is Getting Us Nowhere

Some media talking heads and journalists, such as CNN's Van Jones, are seizing on the killing of George Floyd while in the custody of police officers in Minneapolis, and the slaying of Ahmaud Abery by a father and son in Atlanta, as proof that white racism is as virulent as ever in the U.S.

The claim is nonsense, but before I explain why, I'm afraid I need to say what should not need saying: Anyone, police officer or private citizen, whether white, black, Hispanic or Asian, who murders another person or commits any act of unlawful violence against another human being, whether the victim is white, black, Hispanic or Asian, should and must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

It should also go without saying that justice demands that no one should be condemned without having received due process and proven guilty in a court of law, not in the court of public opinion.

I'm defending neither the officers in Minneapolis nor the men in Georgia who shot Mr. Abery. Excessive use of force by police has been, and continues to be, a serious problem whatever the race of the officers and their victims. The individuals in these and similar cases should be tried and, if found guilty, punished.

Having said all that, it's absurd to cite these interracial killings that go viral on national media as proof of an inherent racism among whites. If interracial violence is to be the litmus test for racism then the attempt to make racism an exclusively white "disease" fails to achieve the purpose. The FBI's statistics show that, in fact, many more whites are the victims of black violence than vice versa.

Consider the statistics for interracial homicide. According to the FBI's crime statistics for 2015, the most recent year for which I could find data, whites murdered 229 blacks and blacks murdered 500 whites. Moreover, according to the US Census Bureau, non-Hispanic whites comprise approximately 61% of the population while blacks make up about 13%.

That means that although there are roughly only a fifth as many blacks as there are whites, blacks murdered more than twice as many whites in 2015 as whites murdered blacks. If interracial violence is an accurate indicator of racism then in members of which race is racism most prevalent?

The point of this is not to make a "who's worse" argument, but rather to urge that we get over our obsession with racism. Let's stop looking for racism in everything and everybody and start giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume the best of every individual until that individual demonstrates unequivocally that they don't deserve that assumption. Let's assume that most Americans are good people who want to get along with their neighbor and want the best for everyone, whether white, black, Hispanic or Asian, until we're presented with solid, empirical reasons to abandon that assumption. Let's start judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

After all, the alternative, our national fixation on racism, is getting us nowhere.