Effacing Our History

It may surprise some readers when I say that I think some communities have good reason to consider removing from their statehouses and town squares vestiges of the Confederacy such as the stars and bars and statues of Confederate leaders, who, after all, committed treason and precipitated a war that took a half million lives.

Honoring these men with monuments seems as peculiar as erecting a monument to honor Benedict Arnold.

These memorials should not, however, be torn down at the insistence of know-nothing mobs. If they're to be removed it should be done respectfully, at the conclusion of calm public debate, and housed in museums. Moreover, those monuments which stand in our National Parks like Antietam and Gettysburg, which are essentially outdoor museums and history classrooms, should be left alone.

Having said that, the self-righteous yahoos rampaging through our streets seeking willy-nilly to topple statues of abolitionists, Christian saints, Europeanized representations of Jesus, past presidents and any other symbol of Christianity and American history they can get their hands on are revealing a shocking depth of ignorance indicative, if nothing else, of an utter failure in our public education system.

It also reveals a highly selective moral outrage. For instance, consider this question: If monuments to every American who was less than perfect are to be expunged from our collective consciousness will the virtue mob next demand the de-naming of every school and street named for Martin Luther King and the removal of every portrait and statue of the man? King, after all, has been, according to some scholars, credibly accused of spousal abuse, philandering and worse. If every one who is not as pure as distilled water is to be rendered a non-entity by the leftist puritans then why stop with white men?

But the benighted mob is impervious to questions like this. Like a forest fire feeds on wind and tinder, the left is in the grip of a hysteria that feeds on abject historical ignorance and irrationality. They're mostly twenty-somethings so they think they know everything there is to know and they're overflowing with vast surpluses of moral sanctimony.

Here's an example of this ignorance and irrationality:

Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College at the University of London, surveyed self-described liberals and found that 44 percent of self-described liberals and 58 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” agreed that the United States should “remove the monument to four white male presidents at Mount Rushmore, as they presided over the conquest of Native people and repression of women and minorities.”

Of course, the native people in question, the Lakota, were themselves in possession of the land because they had brutally seized it from others who possessed it before them, and so on for millenia so who should ultimately get it? Ironically, the New York Times has joined the clamor on behalf of the Lakota, suggesting that Rushmore is a symbol of the white man's maltreatment of native Americans.

I say this is ironic because the New York Times building in Manhattan sits on land that was essentially stolen from the Lenape by the Dutch Europeans in the 17th century. Don't hold your breath waiting for the Times' owners to practice what their paper preaches and return the land their building sits on to descendents of the Lenape.

President Trump held a Fourth of July celebration on Friday evening at Mt. Rushmore which the Democratic National Committee (DNC) fatuously condemned as an event “glorifying white supremacy....Trump has disrespected Native communities time and again. He’s attempted to limit their voting rights and blocked critical pandemic relief. Now he’s holding a rally glorifying white supremacy at Mount Rushmore — a region once sacred to tribal communities,” the DNC tweeted.

About the only thing in this tweet that has any connection to the truth is that Trump held a rally at Mt. Rushmore which is on land once sacred to tribal communities, but then so was much of Manhattan. If the faces of the presidents on Rushmore are a symbol of "white supremacy" are not the skyscrapers on Manhattan likewise? Should the buildings on Manhattan be removed and the land returned to the Lenape? Why not?

In any case it's doubtful that the left really cares much for the Lakota. Most of the young people marching in the streets probably never heard of the Lakota before last week. What the left is trying to do by cutting us off from our history is the equivalent of slicing through the trunk of a tree to sever it from its roots. The trunk may teeter on the stump for a time, but it'll eventually topple. 

That's exactly what the left has in mind for the United States, and if that's what Americans really want there are plenty of candidates running in November who'd be happy to grant them their wish.

On America's Birthday

Today many Americans will celebrate their Independence Day, the day set aside to commemorate the signing of our Declaration of Independence from the Mother Country and the commencement of our nearly two hundred and thirty year experiment as a constitutional republic.

Citizens of most of the world's nations can point to aspects of their history of which they're justly proud and other aspects which they could wish never happened. Americans are no different. There's much to be proud of and some things we could wish were not part of our history. Even so, the cavils of malcontents in our universities and on our streets notwithstanding, we have much to celebrate.

America was founded on certain principles which are rarely enough observed, even in this modern era, despite the lip-service often paid to them. Our Founders declared that all men are created equal, a claim that made the eventual emancipation of slaves and full citizenship of women inevitable.

They forged a nation based on the principles that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and that human beings are endowed by God with inherent rights that can't be taken away without due process.

These two principles were alien to the communist and socialist totalitarianisms of the 20th century, a circumstance which resulted in two world wars, countless smaller conflicts, and over 100 million corpses. Our Founders also guaranteed that we'd have the right to free speech and the freedom to practice our religion, two essential rights without which no society can be truly free.

Yes, there are black marks. We treated the Indians horribly, practiced chattel slavery for seventy years after becoming a nation, and contemporary urban crime and dysfunction is as distressing as it is undeniable, but though it may sound like boastfulness or chauvinism (I truly don't mean it to be), it's hard to think of any nation or empire in history that has been more powerful, brought greater prosperity to its people and those of the world, and has at the same time exceeded America in terms of sheer moral goodness.

The point has been made by others that America is one of the few countries where one can immigrate from anywhere in the world and become an American. What's meant by that is this: Moving to Japan doesn't make you Japanese. Moving to China doesn't make you Chinese. Moving to Mexico doesn't make you Mexican and moving to France doesn't make you French, at least not in the sense that moving to America makes you American.

The very fact that so many people want to come here, that the free world looks to America for leadership - moral, political, and military - is compelling evidence for the conviction that America is indispensable. Indeed, the fact that so many want to come here gives the lie to the left's portrayal of America as irredeemably racist, oppressive, and corrupt.

New York's governor, retorting to President Trump's call to make America great again, opined that America was never that great. Only someone clueless about American history could make such a fatuous assertion.

Where would Europe be today were it not for the United States? Not just our involvement in WWII but also our reconstruction of it in the aftermath. The Marshall Plan cost the United States $103 billion in today's dollars. What other nation would've done that? What other nation would've rebuilt Japan and return to them their national sovereignty after Pearl Harbor and a brutal war that cost almost 65,000 servicemen dead and over 200,000 wounded?

What would Eastern Europe be today had the U.S. washed its hands of European involvement after WWII and chose not to engage in the Cold War with the former Soviet Union?

What nation would have sacrificed over a million people in a civil war fought largely to abolish the institution of black slavery?

Where would Africa and much of the rest of the third world be today were it not for economic aid and health care, both public and private, donated by Americans?

If America ceased to exist in 2020 what would be the likely consequence? Europe would soon become a vassal to an expansionist Russia; North Korea would undoubtedly swallow up South Korea and perhaps Japan; China would certainly grab Taiwan and perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines; India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations, would seek to settle old scores; Radical Muslim groups would turn much of the world into an abattoir; and Israel would be in a fight for its existence against much of the Muslim world, a fight that'd probably result in nuclear war.

It's not unrealistic to fear that America is the only nation preventing much of the world from spiralling into a state of darkness and violent chaos, with freedom flickering out almost everywhere.

On this Fourth of July let's humbly and gratefully celebrate the fact that America is still the hope of freedom-loving people everywhere. Let's all work, those of us who are Americans (and even those who aren't), to keep it that way and to strive continuously to be worthy citizens of this great nation.

Racism at the New York Times

Imagine it were discovered that a white journalist at the New York Times had, as a college student, written a letter to the student paper about African Americans in which the writer claimed that the African American race was "the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief in the modern world." Do you suppose that that white journalist would still be employed at the Times by the end of the day?

Surely not, but if the journalist were an African American woman describing white folks in such terms would it then be acceptable? Should she not be fired just as a white colleague would be?

Well, apparently not as Jordan Davidson at The Federalist explains:

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer [when she was a student there] stating that “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.”

Hannah-Jones claimed that the actions of European settlers and explorers such as Christopher Columbus were “acts of devils” and likens them to Hitler.

“[The whites] lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people,” Hannah-Jones wrote.

Hannah-Jones' 1619 Project at the Times has been roundly panned by historians for its historical inaccuracies - such as her claim that the American Revolution was fought in order to maintain slavery. So bad was her history in the piece that last December five distinguished American historians wrote a letter to the magazine's editor, expressing their dismay "at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it." Their letter can be read here.

Unsurprisingly, her grasp of history while a student at Notre Dame was evidently no better than it is today. Here's more from Davidson:

Hannah-Jones claims Africans arrived in North America long before Europeans, but that unlike Europeans, Africans befriended and traded with the indigenous people. She claims pyramids in Mexico are a symbol of said friendship.

The historical and anthropological ignorance reflected in these claims is stunning, but the "hate-speech" in her letter was worse as she goes on to claim that white people today are still guilty of horrific crimes against black people:

The descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community,” she writes.

“But after everything that those barbaric devils did, I do not hate them,” she wrote. “I understand that because of some lacking, they needed to [sic] constantly prove their superiority.”

Well, perhaps she's sincere when she says she doesn't hate whites (though her use of capitals for "Blacks" and lower case for "whites" is telling), but a white person having made similar comments about blacks would not only be banished to professional exile but find herself the butt of relentless ridicule by late-night comedians if, after having called blacks "barbaric devils" she then tried to deny that she hated blacks.

The Times did not respond to a request for comment on whether their employee still maintained the racist beliefs expressed in her Notre Dame letter, but again, were this a white journalist who had written something similarly offensive and ludicrous about blacks it wouldn't matter whether the writer still held those views or not, that journalist would've been cashiered the very day the college letter came to light.

But at the Times racism is evidently acceptable as long as it's manifested by "people of color." This is the same paper, after all, that employs Sarah Jeong, a sample of whose vile racist tweets can be read in Davidson's article at the above link.  

Here's a litmus test for whether what anyone, white or black, says is actually racist: reverse all the racial references in what was said, and by whom it was said, and ask whether you'd consider the statement racially offensive.

In other words, if it'd be racist if a white person said it then it'd be racist if a black person said it. To deny this would itself be racially discriminatory, would it not?

More on Gorsuch's Terrible Argument

We recently featured on VP excerpts from Rusty Reno's analysis of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County and how Gorsuch's reasoning leads to absurd results.

Recall that Gorsuch argued that if a man (or woman) were fired from a job for engaging in behavior that would've been acceptable were that employee the opposite gender then their dismissal is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In other words, the Court's ruling established that firing an employee simply for being gay or transgender is a violation of federal law under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a form of discrimination based on sex.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the six-justice majority. He established a simple “rule” for when sex discrimination occurs under Title VII: if changing the sex of an employee would change the employer’s decision, then the employer has violated Title VII.

The end result may be proper, but Gorsuch's rule is bound to have some very undesirable unintended consequences. Consider this hypothetical situation proffered by attorney Jacob Roth at The Federalist.

[Gorsuch's] Bostock opinion ... provides the basis for the argument that single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms violate Title VII. Even further, Bostock provides the basis for the argument that it is a violation of Title VII to enforce sexual harassment policies that are mandatory under Title VII.

Imagine an employer that has locker rooms for its employees. There is a male locker room and a female locker room. Each has a communal changing area and a communal shower area. The men in their locker room change and shower in front of one another. The women in their locker room do the same.

The employer also maintains sexual harassment policies that are mandatory under Title VII. These policies prohibit harassing behavior that creates a hostile or offensive work environment, as is federally required.

One day, after reading the Bostock opinion, a male employee who does not identify as transgender walks into the women’s locker room. The women are disrobing in the communal changing area and some are showering. The man disrobes in front of the women, then showers. The employer immediately learns of this and informs the male employee that he has violated the employer’s sexual harassment policies and is fired.

The male employee sues the employer for sex discrimination under Title VII based on the Bostock standard that the decision to fire him for his actions would have been different if he were a woman. The male employee argues that all he did was enter the women’s locker room, disrobe, and shower, and that female employees do those exact actions all the time without penalty.

He argues that his performance of the same actions got him fired only because he was a man doing them, which constitutes sexual discrimination under Bostock in the same way that if a man and a woman at a company are both attracted to men, but only the man is fired for it, then the company has sexually discriminated against the man.

Roth goes on to consider an objection that Gorsuch's defenders might raise, but points out that the objection is easily dispensed with. The problem is that the Gorsuch rule permits a man to do anything that would be permissible for a woman to do and vice versa. If it would be permissible for a female high school coach to mingle in the locker room with her female high school athletes then Gorsuch has made it permissible for a male to do likewise.

It's a maxim among conservatives that ideas have consequences, and it's astonishing that a putatively conservative Justice would've been so oblivious to the implications of this idea.

"A Reprehensible Idea"

Jordan Peterson opens the video below by claiming that "the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible." 

I believe he's right about this. The idea of "white privilege" is as pernicious as it is ubiquitous in our contemporary racial discourse. It's pernicious because it instils feelings of guilt in people who have nothing to feel guilty about, it fosters both white paternalism and black resentment, it drives yet another psycho-social wedge between the races, and it rationalizes black failure, frustration and resignation by implying that the deck is so stacked against blacks that their failures are understandable and excusable.

Any idea that entails those outcomes surely is reprehensible.

Jordan Peterson and Brandon Tatum combine to rebuke and refute the conventional liberal assumption that whites need to own up to their privilege in this Prager U. video in which Peterson is taped responding to a question from a member of a live audience. His segment lasts for 1:43, and is followed by Tatum's segment beginning at the 1:44 mark. 

Peterson is always interesting, but the five minutes or so of Tatum's critique of "white privilege" is especially good.

Check it out:

What Is Social Justice?

As anyone who has spent much time on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of many young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain. In that respect it's much like "systemic racism" or just plain "racism." The terms are easy to wield as rhetorical weapons, but they're not so easy to define.

So what exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers a succinct explanation in a brief video at Prager U.

Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name. Indeed, at least one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, has acknowledged that she and her fellow organizers are communists steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology.

What's sought by these people is not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard his entire life to attain and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all.

One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if points were subtracted from their GPAs and awarded to students who didn't do as well so that everyone gets a C. 

I'll bet not many. Anyway, check out the Goldberg video. It's illuminating.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning Points to a Cosmic Designer

This eight minute video succinctly explains how cosmic fine-tuning is strong evidence for an intelligently designed universe. Don't be put off by the Guy Fawkes masks. The theme of the video series of which this episode is a part is that a new generation of thoughtful young people is refusing to accept the materialist explanations for the universe and life that have prevailed among our cultural elites for a hundred and fifty years or more. 

The metaphysical assumptions of naturalistic materialism are increasingly difficult to sustain given the scientific advances of the last century, especially the last twenty five years, and the masks symbolize this generation's rebellion against the mindless acceptance of a naturalistic worldview to which previous generations of students have been pressured to conform.

A Refreshing Voice

Coleman Hughes is a refreshing black voice in the conversation about race in this country and to see why watch this 7:45 interview with David Rubin, a former leftist:

There are thousands of men and women just like Coleman Hughes in the black community, but progressive media outlets ignore them because if people, especially black people, were exposed to them it would undo everything the left has been trying to accomplish in this country for the last four generations.

The left thrives on racial division and the myth that the only thing holding the black man back is systemic white racism. It thrives on fostering white guilt in liberal whites and the myth of white privilege among young people both black and white.

There is indeed a pathway for poor people, both white and black, into the American middle class but progressives don't want to talk about it because it doesn't depend at all on liberal white paternalism, and in fact in at least one of its elements it refutes one of the major shibboleths of progressive politics over the last fifty years - the myth that women don't need husbands and children don't need fathers.

Professor Bill Galston, President Clinton’s domestic policy advisor and now a senior fellow at Brookings, stated back in the early 1990s that an American need only do three things to avoid living in poverty: graduate from high school, marry before having a child, and have that child after age twenty. Only 8 percent of people who do so, he reported, will be poor, while 79 percent who fail to do all three will.

It sounds so simple, so why is it so hard? One doesn't need to be "privileged" to do any of these things. Nor is "systemic racism" forcing anyone to do otherwise.

Anyway, check out Coleman Hughes' interview

The Astonishing Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies, resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without the tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved very early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did, even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known 1996 paper:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes. Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function.... By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as those comprising the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents. In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves, perhaps unintentionally, the purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this cascade of chemical reactions and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (although, of course, nature has no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind at all. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow retained and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it should take a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input to guide its development than to believe that it arose through the intentional agency of a biochemical genius.

Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Current Crisis

It wasn't too long ago that bumper stickers and t-shirts proclaimed the message that we should "fear no art." Portraits of the Virgin Mary could be covered in elephant dung, crucifixes could be immersed in jars of urine. 

All art was good especially art which offended, but that was until Black Lives Matter and the current wokeness. Now statues and portraits that bruise the delicate sensibilities of the wide awoke are to be torn down. Fear no art only applies, it seems, to art that offends those "deplorables" that the left despises.

By the way, will we soon be demanding that pictures of all the people whose statues are being torn down be expunged from our history textbooks as well? And is it not ironic that most of the statues and portraits that have been thrown down the memory hole are of Democrats? At least they were until the art-haters turned their attention, inexplicably, on Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

Where will it end?

Toward the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency the press was pleased to present to us, whenever the opportunity presented itself, the evidence of his failing mental capacity. Joe Biden is showing worse symptoms than Reagan did and Biden's presidency hasn't even started yet. Nevertheless, the same liberal media that chortled over Reagan's apparent dementia has had almost nothing to say about Biden's.

Does anyone think that if Biden wins the election in November that he'll actually be the president?

It's peculiar that when there are failures in our schools the progressives always say that we need to pump more money into them, but when failures occur in law enforcement the progressives say we have to take more money from them. I wonder what Congressional Democrats would do if someone advanced a proposal to defund the Capitol police force. 

Meanwhile:

Fourteen people, including five children, were killed as more than 100 people were shot in a wave of gunfire in Chicago over the Father’s Day weekend that produced the city’s highest number of shooting victims in a single weekend this year.

Among the victims was 3-year-old Mekhi James, who police said was fatally shot Saturday as the boy was in a car with his father in the south Austin neighborhood. Police said the child's 27-year-old father was the intended target when someone fired shots at the vehicle, but he is not cooperating with detectives.

The weekend's other young shooting victims included a 13-year-old girl who died after being shot in the neck while watching TV in her home, and two boys, ages 17 and 16, killed in a separate shooting on Saturday. Police Superintendent David Brown said police were working hard to track down those responsible for the violence in several Chicago communities. He said “gangs, guns and drugs” are the common thread in those shootings.

In all, 102 people were shot across Chicago from Friday evening to Monday morning — the highest number of shooting victims in a single weekend this year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.The violence comes nearly a month after Chicago had its deadliest Memorial Day weekend since 2015 as nine people were killed and another 27 wounded in shootings.

So where's the outrage, the protests? Where's Black Lives Matter, or do they only care about black lives when those lives are taken by white cops? According to the left what we need are fewer, more poorly funded police officers on the streets. That'd be sure to reduce the violence. 

Even so, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is in favor of the idea so it's got that going for it.

An Endless Argument

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson constructs an imaginary but not uncommon exchange between a Darwinian (Evolver) and an Intelligent Design advocate (Designer):

Designer: The formation of proteins from amino acids cannot occur in an aqueous prebiotic setting. Hydrolysis will attack the peptide bonds —
Evolver: Excuse me for interrupting, but that is not how proteins formed.
Designer: In the Oparin-Haldane model —
Evolver: You mean the Oparin-Haldane strawman?
Designer: But their “thin organic broth in a reducing atmosphere” was the leading prebiotic scenario for much of the 20th century.
Evolver: Hello, it’s 2020. The field has moved on. Proteins exist, so using a prebiotic soup model for their origin, when we already know that doesn’t work, cannot be right. You need to address the actual prebiotic pathway that occurred, not some old and erroneous hypothesis.
Designer: All right, what is the actual prebiotic pathway to proteins?
Evolver: We’re working on that. The tour bus is leaving, try to keep up.

Nelson states that "We could continue this dialogue indefinitely, with Designer critiquing as unworkable, or false, every prebiotic protein origins hypothesis put forward by Evolver — and yet Evolver stands there, untroubled, yawning and checking the messages on his iPhone."

The reason that no progress can be made in such an encounter is because of an unstated assumption in Evolver's argument. Evolver tacitly assumes that naturalism, the belief that there are no non-natural forces at work in the universe, i.e. that there's no supernatural agency, is true. Here's the argument as it might appear to an onlooker (I've altered Nelson's version a bit):

1. Proteins exist.
2. Naturalism is true (tacit assumption)
3. Therefore, any non-naturalistic explanation for the existence of proteins must be false.

Obviously, this argument hinges on the truth of premise 2, but that premise is not a scientific assertion, it's metaphysical. It's a philosophical assumption for which there's scant, if any, evidence.

Designer's argument might go something like this:

1. The genesis of proteins is exceedingly improbable on any naturalistic hypothesis.
2. Proteins exist
3. Therefore, it's exceedingly improbable that naturalism is true.

The debate then is not really over the science. Evolver's commitment to a naturalistic explanation for all biological phenomena is not scientific, it's psychological. It's not based on any empirical evidence but rather on a psycho-emotional preference. It's the same sort of commitment that many people make to their religious beliefs.

Thus, Designer's task is a difficult one. His argument is scientific. It's based on biochemistry, probability and information theory, all of which militate against Evolver's naturalism. Nevertheless, no matter how much evidence he adduces to show that the biochemical hurdles to a naturalistic origin of the first proteins are astronomically high, Evolver will simply take refuge in his faith that naturalism is true and that there must therefore be some naturalistic explanation for how proteins evolved.

The irony is that Designer's case is scientific but points to a supernatural agent as the architect of the first life whereas Evolver's argument dresses itself up as science in appealing to natural forces as the cause of living things, but it has, in fact, much more in common with religion than does Designer's argument.

Pandemic Hypocrisy

John Daniel Davidson, political editor at The Federalist, argues that, should a second wave of coronavirus infections strike us this Fall, Americans should ignore lockdown orders from governors and mayors who sacrificed all their credibility and moral authority during the recent protests.

He writes:

Simply put, the people in charge have shown themselves to be rank hypocrites who care more about politics than science. For months, we were told that large gatherings were deadly because of the coronavirus, but when protests broke out in late May, large gatherings were suddenly okay. 

The exact day the experts lost their credibility was June 4, when more than 1,000 public health workers signed a letter claiming the protests were “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.” 

The woke corporate press scrambled to assure us this wasn’t hypocritical at all, and that “health is about more than simply remaining free of coronavirus infection,” as a pair of epidemiologists put it in The Atlantic.  

That’s a curious argument to make after forced business closures and lockdown orders destroyed tens of millions of American jobs, ruined countless businesses and livelihoods, and caused a sharp uptick in suicides, drug overdoses, and domestic abuse. 

Never mind the compelling research that lockdowns are overall much worse for public health than the coronavirus.

Davidson provides links for the claims he makes throughout the article. It is ironic that our public health experts told us that no cost was too high to save lives, as New York Governor Cuomo put it, but as soon as the protests and rioting started the rationalizations for permitting them came thick and fast.

Here's Davidson again:

Witness the appalling double standard of men like New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio.  

On Monday, city workers welded shut the gates of a Brooklyn playground frequented by members of the Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg. They claimed it was necessary to stop the spread of the coronavirus. 

But this happened one day after the city allowed a massive “Black Trans Lives Matter” rally in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza that attracted thousands of protesters packed together in close quarters.

Davidson gives a number of other examples of this hypocrisy in his article. Here are a few:

In Washington, D.C., which has seen days on end of massive BLM protests, some numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Mayor Muriel Bowser on Wednesday announced the city would begin “phase 2” of its reopening next week.

For restaurants, that means no more than 50 percent capacity, tables six feet apart, and all diners must be seated at the tables.

Same thing in Los Angeles, where thousands converged on Hollywood Boulevard Sunday for a Black Trans Lives Matter rally. Video footage of the event showed attendees packed tightly together on the street, with no possibility of social distancing.

According to news reports, there were no police present at the rally, and the city made no effort to stop it or limit attendance.

But like D.C. and other cities, Los Angeles still has strict pandemic policies for businesses, churches, and just about everything else.

For houses of worship, the city has issued elaborate guidelines for reopening, including a limit to the total number of people, clergy, and parishioners combined, who can attend a service: 25 percent of building capacity or 100 people, whichever is lower.

Government officials have indeed lost their credibility as well as their moral authority. Should there be a "second wave," and these officials order people to once again shut down their shops, churches, and restaurants it's not likely that many of them will be taken seriously.

Naturalism's Daunting Difficulty

Within the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty, the belief that nature is all there is (i.e. naturalism) and that everything in the universe can be explained by natural processes, has run up against a serious, and perhaps fatal, difficulty. 

The problem is that biologists have come to realize that the fundamental substrate of living things is not matter, as naturalism has always held, but information. Information is contained in codes like the amino acid sequence in proteins or the nucleic acid sequence in DNA and RNA, and the origin of information, especially in the first living cell, is inexplicable in terms of random, unguided, unintelligent natural processes.

This 21 minute video does an excellent job of explaining the problem in terms that are easy to understand and follow. It features a protein chemist (Doug Axe) and a philosopher of science (Stephen Meyer), both of whom have played prominent roles in bringing the significance of biological information in the origin of life to public attention.

Any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life has to show how the enormous improbabilities of evolving just a single protein can be overcome by mindless chance. It's a daunting task. Watch the video to see why:

For Father's Day

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family.

Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Tomorrow is Father's Day in the U.S. so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

What the Third World Owes to Missionaries

I find myself often referring in conversation with friends to Rodney Stark's excellent book titled How the West Won. Like all his books HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in the book that all of the progress we've enjoyed in the world since the medieval period has had it's genesis in the West.

His theory, to my mind convincingly defended, is that progress only occurred in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were.

He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal, non-arbitrary God. Where this belief was absent, as it was everywhere but Europe, science and technology, medicine and learning, either never developed or were never sustained.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic on the left but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we've been told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry.

Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. 

Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study has ever been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anti-colonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics, who never made life better for anyone, sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant, or even stupid, but if nothing else they certainly display a moral blindness.

The Gorsuch Opinion

Set aside for a moment your views on homosexuality, gay marriage and transgenderism, whatever those views may be, and consider the argument made by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in his majority opinion in the Bostock case. In fact, let's let Rusty Reno, the editor at First Things, dissect the logic.

Reno writes:

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County offers a striking display of sophistry in service of the spirit of the age. The Court had to rule on whether Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The 6-3 decision held that the Act does indeed forbid such discrimination.  

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, which is said to be a straightforward textualist interpretation. Title VII stipulates that it is unlawful “for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

There is no mention of sexual orientation or transgenderism. But Gorsuch has a clever argument. He notes that if a man identifies as a woman and is fired for doing so, then he is being fired for something that would be entirely OK if he were a woman. 

The same holds for homosexuality. A man who has sex with men would not trouble someone who objects to homosexuality if he were a woman. Therefore, employment decisions based on rejections of homosexuality or transgenderism are, in truth, forms of discrimination on the basis of sex, which is prohibited by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Gorsuch is being too clever by half. As Reno points out, his reasoning fails the test of argument by analogy:

The logic of Gorsuch’s reasoning is elegant but unworkable. New York law prohibits discrimination on the basis of marital status, as do many other states. By Gorsuch’s reasoning, it would therefore be illegal to discipline or dismiss an employee for committing adultery. 

Such an act would be acceptable if the person were not married, and thus to consider it cause for action amounts to discrimination on the basis of marital status. 

Or consider a McKinsey consultant who presents as white but identifies as black. He insists upon his right to join the black consultants group at the firm. Any measure that McKinsey might take against him would count as racial discrimination for precisely the reason adduced in Gorsuch’s opinion. 

Were the consultant black, his identifying as black would be acceptable. It is the fact that he is white that makes the situation difficult for the employer, who wishes to encourage support groups and mentoring for black employees. 

Therefore, if disciplined, the white who identifies as black is being discriminated against on the basis of his race.

Critics of the Bostock decision argue that it's another step in the abolition of free speech and freedom of religion. Those who would sue churches and religious schools for refusing to hire gay and lesbian employees whose sexual identity violates the tenets of the church's doctrine will now have even more powerful weapons at their disposal.

Reno asserts that,

Gorsuch piously denies that the decision has implications for bathrooms, women’s sports, and other aspects of civil life recently contested by LGBT activists. But it obviously does. The civil rights doctrine of “hostile environment” will be used to compel employers to enforce “preferred pronouns” and censure any statements of traditional sexual morality. 

The Supreme Court has determined that stamping out discrimination is a “compelling state interest,” which can override many of our constitutional rights, including religious liberty (as the Bob Jones case indicates).

There's more to Reno's column at the link. The court had to twist the Constitution to find in it a right to abortion in Roe in 1973. It had to twist it again to find in it a right to penalize under Obamacare those who didn't buy insurance and then again a right to gay marriage in Obergefell in 2015. 

Now the court is again indulging in sophistry to justify the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the 1964 Civil Rights Act which makes no mention of these contemporary concepts.

One may reply that these things should be included in the law, that it's the right thing to do, but that's not the point. If the Civil Rights Act should be revised that's the role of the legislature, not the courts. The role of the courts is to decide what the law says and whether a certain behavior conforms to the law or not. Their role is not to find creative ways to twist the law to make the behavior fit what the justices think the law should say.

It's as surprising as it is disappointing that Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts have strayed so far from what we had been given to understand their judicial philosophy would be.

Do Minds Exist and Does it Matter?

Physicalism is the view that everything in the universe, including us, can be explained in terms of physical laws such as the laws of physics and chemistry. This view is similar to what's called materialism which holds that there are no non-material substances or entities in the universe. Everything that exists is made of material stuff, atoms, or is derived from matter.

These two ways of seeing the world dominated science and philosophy throughout the twentieth century but have become increasingly untenable as evidence continues to pile up that there's more to reality than just matter.

A recent post on VP borrowed from a discussion on the evidence that convinced pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield that something besides just our material brains was involved in our cognitive experience and that materialism and physicalism could not explain conscious experience..

The following video is put out by Inspiring Philosophy and takes the discussion a few steps further. It assesses a number of additional lines of evidence that point to the existence of an immaterial mind that works with the brain but is independent of it. 

The video is a bit long, but if you're interested in the reasons why substance dualism (the view that there are two disparate substances responsible for our mental phenomena - matter and mind) is gaining renewed acceptance among philosophers and neuroscientists then you'll want to watch as much of it as you have time for.

The question of whether materialism is correct or not has important consequences for one's religious beliefs. The beliefs that we have a soul, that we have free will, that we have a self which perdures through time, that there's life after death, that there's moral accountability after death, and that God exists are all much more compatible with dualism than they are with materialism/physicalism..In fact, most materialists deny all of these beliefs.

Here's the video:

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.