Human Language: An Evolutionary Mystery

Several years ago I did a post titled Human Exceptionalism in which I noted that many researchers investigating the uniqueness of human language have concluded that it defies any naturalistic explanation for its origin.

That post sent me back to one I did a couple of years ago on the last book written by the late Tom Wolfe which was also on the mystery of human language and I thought I'd repost it.

Here it is:

I've been enjoying Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the theory of evolution and/or the history of the study of linguistics. Michael Egnor at Evolution News concurs with this commendation, and goes even further. Rather than me telling you what the book is about, I'll quote Egnor:

Tom Wolfe has a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and it's superb. Wolfe's theme is that human language is unique and is not shared in any way with other animals. He argues forcefully that evolutionary stories about the origin of human language are not credible.

In the first chapter of his book, Wolfe describes an article in the journal Frontiers of Psychology from 2014, co-authored by leading linguist Noam Chomsky and seven colleagues. Wolfe declares that:

"The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever," [the authors] concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we'll keep trying, they said gamely... but we'll have to start from zero again.

One of the eight was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. "In the last 40 years," he and the other seven were saying, "there has been an explosion of research on this problem," and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia....

One hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced, and they had learned...nothing....In that same century and a half, Einstein discovered the ...the relativity of speed, time and distance... Pasteur discovered that microorganisms, notably bacteria, cause an ungodly number of diseases, from head colds to anthrax and oxygen-tubed, collapsed-lung, final-stage pneumonia....Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the so-called building blocks genes are made of...and 150 years' worth of linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline discovered...nothing...about language.

What is the problem? What's the story?...What is it that they still don't get after a veritable eternity?

Wolfe provides a précis of his argument:

Speech is not one of man's several unique attributes -- speech is the attribute of all attributes!

Yet despite almost two centuries of speculations and hypothesizing we're no closer today to being able to explain what language is or how we come to have it than we've ever been. Indeed, Darwin and his votaries tried to come up with a plausible explanation and failed so utterly that scientists gave up for almost eighty years trying to explain it. Says Wolfe:

It is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man - language - was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

It's also hard to believe that it's been 67 years since 1949 and still no progress has been made on this question. Egnor writes:

And yet, as Wolfe points out, Darwinists are at an utter loss to explain how language -- the salient characteristic of man -- "evolved." None of the deep drawer of evolutionary just-so stories come anywhere close to explaining how man might have acquired the astonishing ability to craft unlimited propositions and concepts and subtleties within subtleties using a system of grammar and abstract designators (i.e. words) that are utterly lacking anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Egnor, who is himself a neuroscientist, closes his piece with these words:

I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind.

The human mind has immaterial abilities -- the intellect's ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing -- and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses. We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language -- a simulacrum of our abstract minds -- has no root in the animal world.

Language is the tool by which we think abstractly. It is sui generis. It is a gift, a window into the human soul, something we are made with, and it did not evolve.

Language is a rock against which evolutionary theory wrecks, one of the many rocks -- the uncooperative fossil record, the jumbled molecular evolutionary tree, irreducible complexity, intricate intracellular design, the genetic code, the collapsing myth of junk DNA, the immaterial human mind -- that comprise the shoal that is sinking Darwin's Victorian fable.

The charm of Wolfe's book is that it reads like a novel, which is the metier for which Wolfe is famous. It's free of scientific jargon, it's funny and contains some fascinating insights into several of the major figures in the history of the search for an explanation for the origin and nature of language. Plus, it's only 169 pages long.

All in all a great read.

An Amazing Molecule

A decade ago I wrote a post on Stephen Meyer's new (at the time) book titled Signature in the Cell. In that post I wrote this:

In the controversy between Darwinian materialism and intelligent design there are four main issues over which the battle is joined. These are the origin and structure of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of species or diversity, and the origin of human consciousness.

It's interesting that despite materialist boasts of epistemic superiority they have a theory for only one of these (speciation). For each of the others the materialists have no testable, empirical, scientific explanations at all. Notwithstanding, we're constantly reminded by experts such as Judge Jones of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District case that Darwinian materialism is science and intelligent design (ID) is religion.

Even the one theory that the materialists do have, common descent, often proves to be a procrustean bed for the facts that scientists uncover in their daily work, but even so, that theory is really not at issue between IDers and Darwinians. What's at issue in the debate are not the scientific facts, but the theoretical significance of those facts.

The materialist says that the universe, life, and consciousness each has a purely material explanation even if they haven't the haziest idea what it could be, and the IDer says that the scientific evidence that we have in each of these areas points most plausibly to intelligent agency.

Now comes a book by Stephen Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, that shows the utter implausibility of materialist explanations for the origin of life. SIC may well prove to be a game-changer in the debate over whether the origin of life can be explained in purely physical terms. Surely if Judge Jones had read it he would have been hard pressed to arrive at the conclusions he did. SIC will make it very difficult for future critics of ID to get away with some of their traditional accusations and arguments.

In his book Meyer accomplishes a number of things: He demonstrates in convincing fashion the sheer implausibility of any materialist explanation for the DNA enigma, i.e. the origin in the genetic material of specified functional information. He methodically makes the case that of the possible explanations for the digital code inscribed on nucleic acid molecules - chance, physical law, a combination of chance and law, or intelligent purpose - the best is clearly intelligent purpose.

He also takes on just about all of the common objections to ID, especially those which arose in the 2005 Dover trial, and one by one shows each of them to be lacking in any real force. The complaint that ID is religious, that it's not science, that it's a souped up version of creationism, that it's not testable, makes no predictions, and leads to no research are all addressed and thoroughly refuted.

His argument is so thorough and so devastating to materialism that many readers will find themselves wondering how anyone could still embrace the materialist explanation of origins.

Meyer adopts an interesting format for his book. He weaves the science and philosophy together with his personal intellectual biography to trace how he came to hold the views he does.

The book is long (508 pages) and not every chapter will interest those who may not have much background in cell biology, but he makes every topic accessible even to the scientifically uninitiated. He unravels the argument throughout the book, but for me his discussion in the epilogue of how information is not only coded straight forwardly on the DNA molecule, but how the same nucleotide sequences can code for different proteins depending on a host of complex biochemical conditions, much like a word can have multiple meanings depending on the context in which it is used, was of special interest.

His explanation, too, of how information is stored not only in nucleic acids but also in structures in the cell, and indeed the very structure of the cell itself, was fascinating.

To get an idea of how astonishing this is imagine a page of text. The text itself has one meaning, but if it appears on a certain kind of paper it might take on additional meanings. Moreover, if you read, say, every third word yet another meaning would come to light, or if you read the text backwards still another meaning would be revealed.

The information in the cell has this kind of complexity. Intelligent cryptologists can create this sort of code, but blind chance and physical forces have never been known to do so, nor, as a matter of probability, is there any but the most nominal chance that they could.

Here's a recently produced six minute video which beautifully illustrates just a smidgeon of the amazing complexity of the DNA molecule. As you watch bear in mind that according to materialism these properties of this molecule are all the result of blind luck:

Critical Race Theory

President Trump recently banned the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in all government departments in the executive branch where it had been prominent in diversity training seminars and workshops. This raised the question in the minds of many as to what, exactly, critical race theory is and why the administration would proscribe it.

An article by Bradley Devlin at the Daily Caller answers that question. Devlin, leaning heavily on a book titled “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction” by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, writes that there are four key beliefs that undergird the theory.

1. The Belief That Racism is the Ordinary Condition of Society.

CRT holds that racism permeates every aspect of our society - its institutions, laws, history, values, customs and social interactions. It's inherent in the dominant (white) class and every white person is, whether they know it or not, racist.

Thus, the proponent of CRT will examine every interaction, every element of culture, to spot the underlying racism and root it out.

2. The Belief in Interest Convergence.

CRT also teaches that whites comprise the "oppressor class" in America and give people of color opportunities to be full participants in society only when it's in their (whites) interest to do so. In other words, only when the interests of blacks converge with the interests of whites will whites willingly grant blacks equal treatment.

In CRT racism is an affliction solely of the dominant class in society. The oppressors are racists and can't be otherwise, the victims of oppression are not racist and cannot be.

Since whites only take up the mantle of anti-racism when it benefits them socially, interest convergence implies that the action of becoming an anti-racist is actually itself a racist act.

It's hard to see how the Civil War, Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s were all in the interests of the white oppressor class, but that's what CRT teaches.

3. The Belief That Classical Liberalism Is Oppressive.

Liberalism was a political idea developed by the oppressive class, according to CRT, and is how the oppressor maintains and creates oppressive systems. Thus, classical liberalism, i.e. the ideal of a free people living in a free society enjoying free markets and minimal government intrusion in their lives, is oppressive in itself.

Critical race theorists advocate a Marxist-style revolution, which, if history is a guide, is almost certain to replace one form of oppression with a much worse one, but then such details don't seem to deter the Critical Race theorist.

4. The Belief That There Are Alternative Ways Of Knowing.

Mr. Devlin explains this pillar as follows:

Critical Race theorists argue that since traditional ways of knowing — science, rational inquiry, logic — are institutions of white supremacy and how whites understand the world, other ways of knowledge accumulation must be adopted. Storytelling, more specifically, telling counter-stories (like the 1619 Project) is the primary way to challenge the dominance of traditional knowledge.

This, of course, assumes that people of color are incapable of understanding science and logic which certainly seems to be itself a racist assumption. It sounds as though it could've been lifted right out of white supremacist propaganda.

Devlin goes on in his essay to explain how CRT is a blend of Marxist thought and postmodern assumptions about truth, and the interested reader should check out his article at the link.

Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine anything more likely to divide people along racial lines, more likely to engender racial hatred and resentments, and more likely to insure that blacks remain mired in poverty and defeat, than the idea that whites are inherently and ineradicably evil, that the country, root and branch, is morally corrupt, and that blacks are both inherently good and at the same time incapable of competing intellectually with whites.

But that's what Critical Race Theory promotes. The Trump administration should be applauded for expunging it from our government institutions and for no longer requiring taxpayers to subsidize such a polarizing doctrine.

Now, if only we could get it out of our university classrooms we'd have a much better chance of seeing our children enjoy a racially harmonious future.

Hispanics Are Moving Toward Trump

Giancarlo Sopo is the Trump re-election campaign's director of rapid response for Spanish Language Media so he'd be expected to shine the best light on Republican efforts to woo Hispanic voters that he can. Even so, his recent essay in The Federalist and the statistics which accompany it are quite stunning.

For instance, in 2016 Trump won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote, a total that fell below the 31 percent GOP presidential candidates have averaged since 1980, but two recent surveys show Trump currently at 35 and 37 percent of the Hispanic vote. These are the highest Hispanic totals for a Republican since 2004.

These are nation-wide figures, but state polls are not encouraging for the Biden campaign either. Some of them show Mr. Biden failing to garner the same level of support Hillary Clinton did in a losing effort to Trump in 2016. Here's Sopo:

In Florida, a survey by Democratic polling firm Equis Research found Biden running 11 points behind Hillary Clinton’s Hispanic vote margin over Trump in a state that she lost. According to a new NBC/Marist poll released this week, among Latino voters, Trump is leading in the Sunshine State with 50 percent compared to Biden’s 46.

A recent Rice University and Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation poll found Biden trailing Clinton’s Hispanic vote margin over Trump by a whopping 18 points. Meanwhile, a new Bendixen & Amandi poll found Trump crushing Biden by 38 points among Cuban Americans, which had been previously trending Democratic.

It should be noted that all this is despite the fact that Democrats have sought to use Trump's immigration policies as a hammer to pound him with among Hispanics. Nevertheless,

Latinos recognize the president is a strong leader whose policies delivered record-low unemployment and poverty levels for our communities before the global pandemic.

GOP operatives often say that Hispanics are natural GOP constituents because we are hard-working, family-centric, and pro-life. This is all true, but we also resist the left’s cultural edicts. Much of the president’s broader policy agenda — yes, including on immigration — is popular with Hispanics. This is a fact that befuddles many political observers, and some refuse even to acknowledge it.

Sopo has more for interested readers at the link, but the upshot is that the Democrats can ill-afford to lose such a large percentage of the Hispanic vote in November. Yet they find themselves stuck with a candidate, Joe Biden, who simply doesn't generate much enthusiasm in this demographic, even among those who've traditionally voted Democratic.

On 9/11 A Thought about Missionaries

On this date nineteen years ago, a group of savage fanatics launched the worst ever attack on the American mainland in hopes of ultimately destroying this nation and the values it was founded upon.

As a counter to the foolish assumptions about Western civilization that motivated those terrorists, as well as those who cheered them on, I'd like as a kind of observance to rerun an older VP post based on sociologist 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 it that all of the progress the world has enjoyed since the medieval period has had its genesis in the West.

His theory, to my mind convincingly defended, is that progress originated 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 among progressive intellectuals 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 marvelous 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 in remote lands a century or more ago.

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

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the charges leveled against Christian missionaries (along with colonialists in general) is that they imposed "modernity" on much of the non-Western world. 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 sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, never having made anything better for anyone, blithely and 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.

Yes, and what of those who sought on 9/11/2001 to cripple and perhaps destroy one major fount of all this blessing? What might be said not only of them but also of the young Marxist rioters in our streets today who believe that the West has been, and is, thoroughly evil and deserves ruination?

well,for starters it might be said that their historical ignorance is appalling.

Woodberry's paper can be read in pdf here.

Political "Normlessness"

As William McGurn writes in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, the president has frequently dismayed his opponents and supporters alike by his insoucient disregard for norms of conduct that've traditionally been upheld by our presidents and national politicians. He seems unable to abide by the conventions of deportment appropriate to his office, and he is regularly thrashed by the media for his boorish behavior.

However, as McGurn also notes, his opponents are at least as bad, if not worse, yet they never seem to receive more than a slap on the wrist from the media. One recent egregious example was the article published by The Atlantic which accused Mr. Trump, based entirely on anonymous sources, of calling our war casualties "Losers" and "Suckers."

To print such serious allegations, based on nothing more than anonymous testimony, is a flagrant violation of journalistic ethics, a dereliction The Atlantic would never commit had similar allegations concerned Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Yet most progressive media have given the magazine's editor a pass, presumably because the article wounded Trump.

McGurn writes:

The Trump-justifies-the-means rationale has been as poisonous for the nation as anything the president has done. Start with this: Has there ever been a norm violation more grievous than the way the Justice Department and FBI were politically weaponized to intervene in an election and then take down an elected president, built on a salacious Russian dossier commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and lies to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court?

Not to mention intelligence chiefs such as CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who publicly painted the president as a Russian agent while privately testifying to Congress they’d seen no evidence for such a claim.

He goes on to list about a dozen other examples, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi's infamous ripping up of the president's State of the Union speech, Congresswoman Maxine Waters' encouraging people to harass Trump officials in restaurants and shops, Hillary Clinton's urging Joe Biden not to concede if he loses the election, and the prolonged harassment of Mr. Trump via an absurd impeachment proceeding.

He could've also mentioned the absolutely baseless slander, repeated frequently by his opponents, that Mr. Trump, should he lose in November, will refuse to vacate the White House and will need to be forcibly removed. What evidence do they have that such a claim is true?

McGurn continues:

Where was the press skepticism about the Steele dossier or the whole Russia collusion narrative? Can anyone remember headlines about norm busting when Americans learned the FBI agent accused of altering a document for a FISA court had declared himself part of the “resistance”?

Or when a text revealed the FBI’s lead investigator into the Trump and Clinton campaigns telling his FBI lover that they will “stop” Mr. Trump from becoming president?

Against this, the standard rhetorical excesses likening the president to murderous totalitarians— Trump is Hitler, Trump is Stalin, Trump is Mussolini— look almost quaint.

Almost any breach of decorum and civility has been justified if it'll hurt the president and diminish his chances of winning in November. The media simply loathes the man, not because of his intemperant behavior - indeed, were he a Democrat they'd busily be making excuses for it - but for what he's doing to roll back the massive progress the left has made over the last fifty years toward establishing a socialist, centralized state in America.

The left can't abide the fact that President Trump has appointed hundreds of lower court judges and a few Supreme Court justices, all of whom believe the role of a judge is to interpret the law, not to impose a law of their own creation on the American people.

They resent that his low tax, low regulation policies had created, until the pandemic broke out, the best economy in living memory and that, for all the progressive talk about concern for the working poor, Mr. Trump's policies actually put more poor minorities back to work than anything any of his predecessors had done.

In other words, the left despises Trump primarily because he's showing the world that the big government nostrums they've advocated since the 1930s don't work in the real world and that free people and free markets do.

There Are No Facts

Of late we've been hearing that we live today in a post-fact, post-truth world. Milo Yiannopolis, the gay bad boy loathed by campus liberals and many conservatives as well, once observed that “We live in a post-fact era and that is wonderful.” I must politely disagree, not with the first part of his assertion which is, I say it with irony, factual, but with the second. It's not so wonderful at all, in my opinion.

Facts matter because truth matters, but the subjectivization of truth, most obvious in the frequently heard claim that "What's true for you isn't true for me," has made it difficult to hold onto the concept that there actually is any objective truth about most things that really matter. The conviction that there is is so 20th century.

One manifestation of the loss of a belief that truth is objective, and that it matters, is the apparent eruption in recent months and years of "fake news" stories.

Daniel Payne at The Federalist lists sixteen "Fake News" stories in the major media just since Trump's election, all of which were false or misleading, but which were repeated thousands of times on social media before the truth came out.

Of course, if we're living in a post-truth era, it may largely be due to the fact that our media and our politicians, most notably Mr. Obama and even more egregiously, Mr. Trump, seem to live in a world where facts don't matter at all. As Peter Pomerantsev, in an essay at Granta, pungently observes, what's different today is not merely that we're living in "a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not."

Pomerantsev places much of the blame on the postmodern mindset:

How did we get here? Is it due to technology? Economic globalisation? The culmination of the history of philosophy? There is some sort of teenage joy in throwing off the weight of facts – those heavy symbols of education and authority, reminders of our place and limitations – but why is this rebellion happening right now?

This equaling out of truth and falsehood is both informed by and takes advantage of an all-permeating late post-modernism and relativism, which has trickled down over the past thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else.

This school of thought has taken Nietzsche’s maxim - that there are no facts, only interpretations - to mean that every version of events is just another narrative, where lies can be excused as ‘an alternative point of view’ or ‘an opinion’, because ‘it’s all relative’ and ‘everyone has their own truth’ (and on the internet they really do).

Maurizio Ferraris, one of the founders of the New Realism movement and one of postmodernism’s most persuasive critics, argues that we are seeing the culmination of over two centuries of thinking. The Enlightenment’s original motive was to make analysis of the world possible by tearing the right to define reality away from divine authority to individual reason.

Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ moved the seat of knowledge into the human mind. But if the only thing you can know is your mind, then, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘the world is my representation’.

In the late twentieth century postmodernists went further, claiming that there is ‘nothing outside the text’, and that all our ideas about the world are inferred from the power models enforced upon us. This has led to a syllogism which Ferraris sums up as: ‘all reality is constructed by knowledge, knowledge is constructed by power, and ergo all reality is constructed by power.

Post-modernism first positioned itself as emancipatory, a way to free people from the oppressive narratives they had been subjected to. But, as Ferraris points out, ‘the advent of media populism provided the example of a farewell to reality that was not at all emancipatory’. If reality is endlessly malleable, then Berlusconi... could justifiably argue, ‘Don’t you realize that something doesn’t exist – not an idea, a politician, or a product – unless it is on television?’

To make matters worse, by saying that all knowledge is (oppressive) power, postmodernism took away the ground on which one could argue against power. Instead it posited that ‘because reason and intellect are forms of domination . . . liberation must be looked for through feelings and the body, which are revolutionary per se.’

Rejecting fact-based arguments in favour of emotions becomes a good in itself.

This sounds about right to me. The postmodern view of objective truth - that it's an outdated holdover from the failed Enlightenment habit of placing too much epistemological confidence in Reason - leads us to the place where a postmodern philosopher like the late Richard Rorty can assert that "Truth is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying."

If one's peer group is the media then there's a pretty broad spectrum of things one can get away with saying, no matter how fantastical, as long as those things are critical of political opponents. Unfortunately for Rorty and his definition of truth, though, his own peer group, philosophers, didn't let him get away with defining truth that way.

Three Random Thoughts

A few short thoughts:

1. Sometimes we hear people say that they respect another person's opinion, but they disagree with it. They mean well but it raises the question, do we owe respect to the opinions of others. IMO the answer is no. We have a duty to respect others and to respect their right to hold their opinion, but sometimes those opinions are simply foolish or even evil, and it's equally foolish to tell someone that we respect it.

When opinions are foolish we should still show respect for the person who holds it, but when the opinion is evil the holder of that opinion forfeits their prima facie right to be respected. For instance, no one owes respect to someone whose opinion it is that molesting children is acceptable.

2. One of the queerest attempts to push wedges between the races is the resentment expressed by some at what they deem to be an unjustifiable "cultural appropriation" of certain aspects of what's considered to be black culture. The latest episode of this was when a white British pop singer named Adele wore "bantu knots" at a festival and was criticized for essentially purloining a hairstyle that is considered to be the cultural property of African Americans.

One might think that those who get upset about this sort of thing should actually take pride in the fact that others appreciate their cultural traits enough to want to adopt them for themselves, but Adele was chastised for her choice of hair styles:

A drag queen who calls herself (himself?) The Vixen tweeted, "Twice this weekend I have seen people do backflips to defend white women in Bantu Knots. If you spent the whole summer posting #blacklivesmatter and don’t see the problem here, you were lying the whole time."

User @sadhanamoodley wrote, "Seriously Adele... You should know better."

Journalist Ernest Owens tweeted, "If 2020 couldn't get anymore bizarre, Adele is giving us Bantu knots and cultural appropriation that nobody asked for. This officially marks all of the top white women in pop as problematic. Hate to see it."

It's all very silly, and in any case, the idea that only members of the race which gave rise to a particular behavior or style or item - like hoop earrings and bantu knots - have the right to adopt that behavior, style or item is as shallow as it is foolish. If the individuals who think this way are going to be consistent they should, unless they're white, forego the use of everything that was originally developed by white Europeans - including cell phones, computers, televisions, radios, motor vehicles, airplanes, medicine and medical technology, home heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, all electrical appliances, and on and on.

Rather than grouse about someone wearing her hair in bantu knots these folks would do better to spend a little time reflecting on how much cultural appropriation they themselves engage in every day of their lives.

3. In discussing the meaning of life students will sometimes argue that life's meaning doesn't depend upon there being a God. They insist that we can still find meaning in trying to make the world a better place, to improve life for our kids and others, whether there is or isn't a God.

What these students sometimes fail to recognize is that the belief that human progress is possible assumes that history is linear, a view that is distinctly and uniquely Judeo-Christian. The notion that history has a beginning and progresses to a climactic denouement was a product of the Judeo-Christian belief in creation, fall, redemption and eschaton that eventually permeated Europe. It never caught on anywhere else in the ancient world.

Most cultures outside Judeo-Christianity and perhaps some of its offshoots, such as Islam, have held a view that history was either static - that things are the same as they always were and always will be - or cyclical, that history moves in grand cycles ultimately returning to an original starting point. The atheistic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, famously held this view which he called eternal recurrence.

So, if someone believes that the world can be improved and that tomorrow can be better than today, they're borrowing an idea whose genesis depends upon belief in the existence of God even if they insist that the existence of God doesn't matter.

A Labor Day Post

Note: This post was originally written before the Covid19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry:

On Labor Day it might be appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law several years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employs 150 people, pays a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act must provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding.

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of those on the left, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but they see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking the politician deserves their vote.

The Intellectual Life

In an interesting - and rather unusual - piece in First Things Paul Griffiths gives advice to young people aspiring to the intellectual life. He lists and discusses four requirements of such a life. The first three are these:

1. The aspiring intellectual must choose a topic to which he or she can devote his or her life. Just as one might fall in love with another, so, too, does one often fall in love with an idea or question.

2. An intellectual must have time to think. Three hours a day of uninterrupted time. No phone calls, no texts, no visits. Just thinking and whatever serves as a support for thinking (reading, writing, experimenting, etc).

3. Anyone taking on the life of an intellectual needs proper training. This may involve university study, but it may not.

What Griffith has to say about each of these is interesting, but the most interesting part of his essay to me is what he says about the fourth requirement. One who aspires to the life of the mind must have interlocutors, i.e. people with whom one can share ideas. He writes:

You can’t develop the needed skills or appropriate the needed body of knowledge without them. You can’t do it by yourself. Solitude and loneliness, yes, very well; but that solitude must grow out of and continually be nourished by conversation with others who’ve thought and are thinking about what you’re thinking about. Those are your interlocutors.

They may be dead, in which case they’ll be available to you in their postmortem traces: written texts, recordings, reports by others, and so on. Or they may be living, in which case you may benefit from face-to-face interactions, whether public or private. But in either case, you need them.

You can neither decide what to think about nor learn to think about it well without getting the right training, and the best training is to be had by apprenticeship: Observe the work—or the traces of the work—of those who’ve done what you’d like to do; try to discriminate good instances of such work from less good; and then be formed by imitation.

Very well, but such people are not easy to find. Most people don't care at all about the things that fascinate and animate an intellectual. Most people are too preoccupied with the exigencies of making a living and raising a family to care overmuch about ideas or the life of the mind.

Where are such interlocutors to be found? The answer these days, as you must already know, is: mostly in the universities of the West and their imitators and progeny elsewhere. That, disproportionately, is where those with an intellectual life are provided the resources to live it, and that, notionally, is the institutional form we’ve developed for nurturing such lives.

I write “notionally” because in fact much about universities (I’ve been in and around them since 1975) is antipathetic to the intellectual life, and most people in universities, faculty and students included, have never had and never wanted an intellectual life. They’re there for other reasons. Nevertheless, on the faculty of every university I’ve worked at, there are real intellectuals: people whose lives are dedicated to thinking in the way I’ve described here....If you want living interlocutors, the university is where you’re most likely to find them.

Griffiths adds this:

You shouldn’t, however, assume that this means you must follow the usual routes into professional academia: undergraduate degree, graduate degrees, a faculty position, tenure. That’s a possibility, but if you follow it, you should take care to keep your eyes on the prize, which in this case is an intellectual life.

The university will, if you let it, distract you from that by professionalizing you, which is to say, by offering you a series of rewards not for being an intellectual, but for being an academic, which is not at all the same thing. What you want is time and space to think, the skills and knowledge to think well, and interlocutors to think with. If the university provides you with these, well and good; if it doesn’t, or doesn’t look as though it will, leave it alone.

The university’s importance as a place of face-to-face interlocution about intellectual matters is diminishing in any case. Universities are moving, increasingly, toward interlocution at a distance, via the Internet. This fact, coupled with the possibility of good conversation with the dead by way of their texts, suggests that for those whose intellectual vocation doesn’t require expensive ancillaries (laboratories, telescopes, hadron colliders, powerful computers, cadres of research subjects, and the like), they should be one place among many to look for interlocutors.

You should, in any case, not assume that what you need in order to have an intellectual life is a graduate degree. You might be better served by assuming that you don’t, and getting one only if it seems the sole route by which you can get the interlocution and other training you need. That is rarely the case....

Here's his conclusion:

And lastly: Don’t do any of the things I’ve recommended unless it seems to you that you must. The world doesn’t need many intellectuals. Most people have neither the talent nor the taste for intellectual work, and most that is admirable and good about human life (love, self-sacrifice, justice, passion, martyrdom, hope) has little or nothing to do with what intellectuals do.

Intellectual skill, and even intellectual greatness, is as likely to be accompanied by moral vice as moral virtue. And the world—certainly the American world—has little interest in and few rewards for intellectuals.

The life of an intellectual is lonely, hard, and usually penurious; don’t undertake it if you hope for better than that. Don’t undertake it if you think the intellectual vocation the most important there is: It isn’t. Don’t undertake it if you have the least tincture in you of contempt or pity for those without intellectual talents: You shouldn’t. Don’t undertake it if you think it will make you a better person: It won’t.

Undertake it if, and only if, nothing else seems possible.

There's a lot of wisdom in all of this.

Naturalism's Incompatibility with Evolution

One of the interesting philosophical developments of the 20th century was the increasingly widespread recognition among philosophers and other thinkers that metaphysical naturalism actually saws off the epistemological branch upon which it had been perched comfortably for the previous three centuries.

Ever since the Enlightenment philosophers inclined toward a naturalistic worldview had touted their devotion to reason and derided those whose beliefs seemed to them to be irrational. They were convinced that they were occupying the intellectual high ground, but in the latter part of the 20th century many thinkers, both naturalists and theists, noting that a naturalistic view of the world entailed a Darwinian account of the origin of human reason, recognized that on Darwinism there's no good basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth.

According to naturalism, evolution, unguided by any intelligent agent, has selected for cognitive faculties in human beings that lead to survival, but survival doesn't necessarily require truth. Indeed, survival could just as easily be enhanced by falsehoods as by truths.

Consider, for instance, a prehistoric society in which a gene mutation causes some people to believe that the more children they produce the greater will be their reward in the afterlife. Those who carry the mutation would tend, on average, to generate more children than those who don't, and since the mutant gene would be passed on to offspring the belief would spread through the population. It would have very high survival value despite its being completely false.

As Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent notes, this is an awkward state of epistemic affairs for naturalists to find themselves in, but, even so, there are lots of examples of naturalists admitting that natural selection, at least naturalistic natural selection, entails precisely the conclusion that reason has evolved to aid our survival not to discover truth, and especially not metaphysical truth.

Arrington offers a sampling of such quotes:

“[Our] brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” Steven Pinker

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman

"We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin

“[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich

“Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Patricia Churchland

“We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins

Of course, a further irony in all this is that if the naturalist cannot trust her reason to lead her to truths about her deepest metaphysical beliefs then she has no good grounds for believing that naturalism, which is itself a metaphysical belief, is true in the first place.

Anyone interested in reading more about the problem of reconciling naturalism with a belief in the trustworthiness of human reason might check out a book by Alvin Plantinga, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. The book is titled Knowledge and Christian Belief, and it's a more accessible version of his earlier, more technical treatment of the same subject titled Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.

Why Life Is Absurd

My classes are discussing the view, held by both atheistic and theistic existential philosophers alike, that human existence and the world in which that existence is lived out are both fundamentally absurd.

Both theists and atheists believe, albeit for different reasons (see below), that the world is fundamentally incompatible with many of our deepest yearnings as human beings. Tragically, we are like square pegs trying to fit into a round hole.

Here are ten examples of this incompatibility:

1. We long to live, but we know we're going to die.
2. We desire answers to life's deepest questions, but they often elude us or seem to be unattainable.
3. We yearn for justice, but many evil men never pay for their deeds and many who suffer in life are never compensated.
4. We want union with those we love, but we are always alienated, separated at the deepest levels of our being from what and whom we love.
5. We hope to find meaning and purpose in our lives, but death seems to erase whatever projects and purposes we cultivate. Ultimately, there is no purpose. As Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg puts it, "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto."
6. We need to ground morality and human rights in something beyond ourselves, but there is nothing which can support them.
7. We strive for happiness, but the world is filled with tragedy, grief, suffering, and pain. Individual happiness can only be achieved by ignoring the existential condition of others who are suffering.
8. We crave peace, but the world is filled with incessant conflict.
9. We want to be treated with dignity, but the cosmos tells us that we are nothing more than “dust in the wind.” We have no freedom, no dignity, no enduring self.
10. We have no reason to trust the ability of reason to lead us to truth. What we call reason evolved to enable us to survive, not to enable us to find the truth. Yale professor Steven Pinker writes that, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Or, as philosopher Patricia Churchland tells us, evolution selects for survival, and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

Theists might not agree with all ten of these, but they'd probably agree with some of them. For the theist the world is incompatible with our deepest yearnings because, she believes, it's not the world for which we were designed and intended.

For the atheist the world is absurd because there's no hope for any rescue from this awful existential predicament. The world is one way, we are another, and there's no God to make it right. Man is forlorn, to use Jean Paul Sartre's term for the haunting sense of aloneness which besets thoughtful people.

Both the theist and the atheist agree that the human story is a tragedy and that life is suffering. Most theists, however, particularly Christian theists, believe that the story will ultimately have a "happy" ending. Atheists believe there is no happy ending.

The atheist agrees with Shakespeare's Macbeth when he laments that, "Life is a passing shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Who's right?

A Just Society

Can we achieve a just society solely through the exercise of our reason? Since justice, being a matter of how we treat people, is a moral issue, the question is really whether reason alone can provide a basis for morality.

The famous 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume didn't think it was possible since he believed that morality is simply a matter of good feeling others have about what you do.

In his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he writes, "Morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation, and vice the contrary." (italics his)

In other words, if society approves of what you do then it's moral. If they disapprove, it's vice. Or, as we might say today, morality is culturally constructed. If that's so - if Hume is correct - then justice is whatever treatment we dispense to others that society approves of, and injustice is whatever it disapproves of.

A little thought will show that this view of justice is completely inadequate. After all, societies have approved of all sorts of things we consider to be unjust - chattel slavery, the oppression of women, infant sacrifice, the Hindu caste system, torturing enemies, to name a few.

If we insist with Hume that these things are just or acceptable because society approved of them then there'd never be any motive or reason to change them. They are morally right and abolishing them would be morally wrong.

We might go one step further and point out that if justice (morality) is a matter of the subjective whims of society, then there can be no objective human rights since such rights are predicated upon a standard of justice that transcends societal norms.

The 19th century atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that, because the Christian God doesn't exist there's no basis for belief in human equality, rights nor dignity, and that all of his contemporary atheists and liberals who prize such values are really piggybacking on Christianity without acknowledging it and probably without realizing it.

In order for there to be human rights there has to be justice, and in order for there to be justice there has to be an objective obligation to do it. The problem for modern man, however, is that having abandoned God he has left himself no objective obligation to do justice and no objective standard for defining it.

He has cast himself adrift at sea in a raft with no anchor nor compass, and oddly enough, he seems scarcely aware of his predicament.

An Amusing Incoherence

A piece of "fake news" at the satirical site The Babylon Bee does a fine job of pointing out the incoherence of many postmoderns who reject the existence of objective moral absolutes and yet complain about dishonesty and corruption in politics and the media.

Here's the Bee's faux news report:

Sources from within the United States confirmed Friday that American society, while typically rejecting concepts like absolute truth and objective moral standards, is suddenly showing grave concern for the rise of fabricated news stories after a reported uptick in fake news during the recent election season and President Trump’s habit of using the term to describe many mainstream media outlets.

One Oregon man, who rejects the idea that humanity can even be sure the universe exists in any meaningful sense, was nonetheless disturbed by the idea that websites could publish completely false information, for anyone in the world to read.

“It’s just absolutely wrong, in my opinion,” said the man who doesn’t believe in absolute ideals of right and wrong at all. “What if someone reads the information and gets like, deceived? That just seems totally wicked.”

“It just doesn’t seem right that they can publish stuff that’s just blatantly not true,” added the man, who also noted his firm belief that everyone has the right to define their own version of truth.

Other Americans agreed, stating that the idea that shady news sites could get away with reporting completely inaccurate information was “disturbing” and “evil,” before stressing their belief that no one individual’s notions about morality are absolute or binding in any meaningful sense.

Tech conglomerates such as Facebook and Google have vowed to meet the trend head-on, assuring the public that they are taking bold steps to filter out any news that contradicts the version of truth that they decide is acceptable.

The Bee is making a humorous jab at a serious incoherence in our contemporary society. If there are no objective moral rights and wrongs then moral outrage at lies and injustice is an absurdity.

We might wonder about all those folks demanding justice and equitable treatment on the streets of our cities whether they accept the idea that all moral claims are simply subjective preferences, matters of taste, and if so, why they think anyone should heed their call to accept their particular subjective moral preferences.

How to Disagree

We are now deep into the next election cycle in the United States. Campaigns for the 2020 presidential election are underway, the conventions have been held, money is being raised, debates will soon take place and positions are being staked out. It seems like the political season never ends, but even so, here we are.

This means that, as disputatious and ornery as the last three years have been, the next couple of months will likely be worse.

As we enter this period in our nation's political life it would be good for those of us who engage in the to and fro of political discussion with friends, family and acquaintances to keep in mind that there are more important things than proving ourselves right on this or that issue.

It would be good in the weeks ahead to keep in mind that those who disagree with us will not be won over to our way of seeing things if our demeanor is arrogant, scowling and angry. They certainly won't find our opinions compelling if we resort to insulting them or their ideas.

The most effective way to disagree in any discussion is with a humble attitude, acknowledging to ourselves and to the other person that we could be wrong about whatever it is we are debating. A winsome approach, seasoned with humility and humor, is likely to be far more persuasive than pummelling one's interlocutor with rhetorical body blows.

In almost every instance, it'll be more important that we respect the person we're engaged in conversation with than that we win an argument with them. After all, as an old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

If the other person gets angry and insulting then it's better that we change the subject to something less contentious. What good can come of continuing it under those circumstances anyway?

If we can respect and love those with whom we disagree, if we can say, "I don't think you're correct, but you're more important to me than my being right," I think we'll be much more attractive to those who differ with us and much more effective in presenting our views and gaining them a hearing.

Political, as well as religious and philosophical, differences are important, in many cases extremely so, but they're not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness.

Our politicians probably won't treat each other that way, but we should.

Best President for Minorities Since Lincoln

It's hard to see how the left can run against Donald Trump on policy. On two of their biggest issues, opposition to war and ameliorating the condition of the poor, especially African American poor, Trump has been extraordinary.

On the matter of war and peace, libertarian senator Rand Paul in his speech at the RNC the other night averred with good reason that President Trump has been the most antiwar commander-in-chief in a generation.

On the question of helping minority poor it can honestly be said that it's hard to think of any president since Abraham Lincoln who has done more to benefit African Americans.

Consider this from Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall): [I]t’s passing strange that the GOP president who has been relentless in promoting policies that benefit minorities is the one the media brands most racist of them all.

There was the First Step Act, which reformed [criminal] sentencing laws; more than 90% of those who have had their sentences reduced are black Americans. The president in 2018 made historically black colleges and universities a priority, putting new money into loans and funding. His tax law created opportunity zones that funnel private investment to inner cities.

He has doubled down on school choice, an issue with 68% support among blacks and 82% among Latinos, according to a Federation for Children poll. His economic policies produced record-low black and Hispanic unemployment.

That last fact is perhaps the most significant of all. Next to strong families, having a job is the surest way to get out of poverty. Strassel points out that Trump's policies toward blacks and Hispanics may swing the election:

In 2016 he scored only 8% of the black vote, 28% of Hispanics, and 27% of Asian-Americans. Yet the polls also show a growing awareness and frustration among minorities that the Obama-Biden years didn’t deliver for their communities. Despite his putative lead nationally, Mr. Biden has less black and Hispanic support at this point in the race than Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did.

Does that softness translate into a giant Trump minority pickup? No. But it doesn’t have to. Democrats like to point out that Mr. Trump won the election by a margin of 80,000 votes across three swing states. The Trump campaign knows that increasing its support—even a little—among minority communities in those and other key battlegrounds could prove huge.

Take Michigan, one of the three, where Mr. Trump won an estimated 6% of the African-American vote in 2016. A recent Trafalgar poll showed his current support at nearly double that, which would translate into tens of thousands of votes. Recent polls have also shown Mr. Trump doing better with Latinos, with one Marist poll showing him up 11% over 2016. Consider what that might mean in Arizona or Florida.

Whether all this translates into a Trump victory in November or not it's simply not credible for his opponents to accuse him or his administration of being "racist," not when he has done more to improve the state of black life in America than any president since Lincoln.

Hitler the Darwinian

About eight years ago Richard Weikart published a study on the roots of the moral thinking of Adolf Hitler, a review of which is posted at Evolution News and Views. Here's an excerpt:

One of the most controversial parts of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was the segment where Ben Stein interviewed the history professor Richard Weikart about his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.

Darwinists were apoplectic, deriding Stein and Weikart for daring to sully the good name of Charles Darwin by showing how Hitler, and German scientists and physicians, used Darwin's evolutionary theory to justify some of their atrocities, such as their campaign to kill the disabled.

Some critics even denied that the Nazis believed in Darwinism at all. Weikart challenges his critics to examine the evidence in his fascinating sequel, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, which examines the role of Darwinism and evolutionary ethics in Hitler's worldview.

In this work Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality actually flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by an ethic based on the evolutionary history of man to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. Hitler's evolutionary ethic underlay, or influenced, almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

It's a tragic historical fact, demonstrated repeatedly throughout the last two centuries, that once people reject the idea that morality is rooted in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and transcendent personal being the next logical step is to abandon the idea that there's any objective moral right and wrong at all.

This step is inevitable since nothing else but such a being as described in the previous sentence could possibly provide a basis for objective morality, and once this step is taken it leads inevitably to moral arbitrariness and subjectivity. In other words, what's right is whatever feels right to me. Moral subjectivism in turn leads directly to egoism, i.e. the belief that one should put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others, and egoism leads ineluctably to the ethic of "might makes right".

Hitler's "morality" was completely consistent with his rejection of a belief in a transcendent moral authority, a God.

Indeed, Hitler was what every atheist would be if a) he or she had the power Hitler had and b) he or she were logically consistent.

Thankfully, few of those who reject belief in a transcendent moral authority are both powerful and consistent, but in the 20th century some were. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler all were atheists who had complete power within their sphere and acted consistently with their naturalistic, materialistic worldview. The horrific consequences were completely predictable.

Being Intellectually Honest

The old adage is that in any social gathering it's bad manners to introduce either religion or politics into the discussion. It may be true that these two topics are unwelcome, yet it's hard to imagine anything that could be more important to discuss. That they're considered taboo says more, perhaps, about the shallowness of much of our social interaction than it does about the topics themselves.

In any case, those who do engage in serious conversation and debate, one would hope, are paramountly concerned with finding and sharing the truth about whatever it is that's being deliberated, but they're often tempted to adopt a number of less-than-helpful tactics that do more to bring discredit upon themselves and the views they advocate than they do to promote the truth.

Some years ago I came across a blog post titled Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty which listed ten good rules to follow when participating with others in dialogue.

Since the link to this post no longer works I'll take the liberty to list the ten rules along with some brief thoughts on them. They're very much worth heeding for anyone who wishes to participate in the conversations, especially those bearing on religion and/or politics, that are occurring in our public square.

Here they are:

1. Do not overstate the power of your argument. One's sense of conviction should be in proportion to the level of clear evidence that most people can assess. If someone portrays his opponents as being stupid or dishonest for disagreeing, intellectual dishonesty is probably in play. Intellectual honesty is most often associated with humility, not arrogance.

2. Show a willingness to publicly acknowledge that reasonable alternative viewpoints exist. The alternative views do not have to be treated as equally valid or powerful, but rarely is it the case that one and only one viewpoint has a complete monopoly on reason and evidence.

3. Be willing to publicly acknowledge and question one's own assumptions and biases. All of us rely on assumptions when trying to make sense of the world, and all of us bring various biases to the table. We should be open and honest about it.

4. Be willing to publicly acknowledge where your argument is weak. Almost all arguments have weak spots, but those who are trying to sell an ideology will have great difficulty with this point and would rather obscure or downplay any weak points. Refusing to admit a weakness in your argument damages your credibility. People are more likely to warm to your view if you're honest about where it falters.

5.Be willing to publicly acknowledge when you are wrong. Just as we should be open about weak spots in our convictions we should be willing to acknowledge that we were wrong about something if, in fact, we were. Ideologues, especially, find this a very difficult thing to do because admitting to being wrong undercuts their rhetoric and the image they're trying to promote. You get small points for admitting to being wrong on trivial matters and big points for admitting to being wrong on substantive points. You lose big points for failing to admit being wrong on something trivial.

6. Demonstrate consistency. A clear sign of intellectual dishonesty is when someone extensively relies on double standards. We see this a lot in our news media and political debates. Typically, an excessively high standard is applied to the perceived opponent(s), while a very low standard is applied to the ideologues' allies.

7. Address the argument instead of the person making the argument. Ad hominem arguments are a clear sign of intellectual dishonesty. When someone resorts to insulting his opponent, often by relying on stereotypes, guilt-by-association, and superficially innocent-sounding "gotcha" questions, they're revealing the inadequacy of their own arguments and trying to deflect attention away from that inadequacy.

8. Be careful not to misrepresent your opponent's argument. Misrepresenting an argument in order to make it look weaker and easier to defeat is called the "straw man" fallacy. Straw man often occurs when people are quoted out-of-context or are paraphrased incorrectly. When critiquing an argument one should show that one has made a good faith effort to both understand it and to represent it in its strongest form.

9. Demonstrate a commitment to critical thinking. It's important that we assign a high level of importance to evidence. Someone who holds adamantly to their position but who can give no reason for their tenacity nor allow evidence-based reasons to count against their position, is not a critical thinker and will not be taken seriously.

10. Be willing to publicly acknowledge when one's opponent has made a good point or criticism. If someone is unwilling to admit that his opponent has made a telling point or an incisive criticism it demonstrates an unwillingness to honestly engage in the give-and-take of dialogue.

My own experience has been that even when I think I'm doing the best I can to abide by the rules described above I still sometimes find myself teetering close to the boundary. Luckily, I have friends and students among my readers who are not shy about calling me on it when they think I've transgressed. Sometimes I think they're wrong, but sometimes not.

I think it's wise to keep in mind that none of us is perfect and to watch carefully how we express ourselves in discussions on matters we feel strongly about. Years ago I printed out these Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty and have them posted over my computer.

Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to do that.

Is Math a Coincidence?

Earlier this month I posted on the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" (Nobel winner in physics Eugene Wigner) to explain the world. Today's post is something of a follow-up to that earlier post which I recommend interested readers to revisit.

We often take for granted that the operations of nature can be explained in terms of mathematical equations. We learned in high school physics (if we took physics) that all physical phenomena are describable mathematically.

Mathematical patterns are ubiquitous in nature from quantum mechanics to the Fibonacci sequence in the whorls of disc flowers of a sunflower to the trajectories of planets in their orbits around the sun. Indeed, it's hard to think of any scientific phenomenon that can't be described mathematically.

What few of us ever do, though, is stop and ask why this should be so. Why is mathematics able to so accurately describe the world?

As the following five minute video points out, naturalism has no good answer to this question. The only satisfactory answer is one that involves an intelligent engineer, a mathematical genius who designed the universe according to a mathematical blueprint.

If some wish to say that this is just the way the universe is and that there's no need of deeper explanation they have to acknowledge that they're essentially admitting that they have no answer to the question, that it's just a bizarre coincidence.

Perhaps, but that requires a lot of faith in blind coincidence.

Can Trump Pull it Off?

As the Republicans begin their nominating convention this week the polls are showing incumbent president Donald Trump trailing challenger Joe Biden by double digits. Many Democrats are confident that they'll defeat Trump in November, but Wayne Allyn Root at Townhall writes that their optimism may be misplaced.

He gives several reasons for thinking that the November election is shaping up to be a Trump victory and begins his column with this:

Democrats behind the scenes are scared and getting more desperate by the day because there are so many signs of a coming Donald Trump victory. The signs are everywhere.

Whether he's right or not about Democrats being scared and desperate I have no idea, but he does provide us with some interesting facts. Here are some of the signs Root thinks point to a Trump victory:

1. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose calls to defund police, including 80 percent of black voters. This does not augur well for Joe Biden and the Democrats who have the defund anchor hanging around their necks.

2. Polls also show that 83 percent of Americans support the decision by President Trump and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson to end former President Obama's program designed to fill the suburbs with high-density, low-income housing, bringing crime and drugs to the neighborhoods of suburban families. This a good sign for Republicans.

Root asks:

Do you think these millions of suburban American homeowners who don't want to see their home value destroyed or their neighborhood turned into war zones like Chicago, Detroit or Baltimore are going to vote enthusiastically for Joe Biden when Biden's presidential platform actually puts in writing his goal to supercharge Obama's "destroy the suburbs" program?

Trump wants to protect your neighborhood. I wonder who suburban moms and dads will vote for.

3. People are fleeing Democrat-controlled cities to escape the crime and dysfunction of those cities. According to Rasmussen, 72 percent of likely voters are concerned about the growing violent protests nationwide. Sixty-two percent say it will affect their vote.

This is another bad omen for Democrats who have expressed overt support for some of the radical movements responsible for the riots and who minimize or ignore the violence in our streets. The people fleeing deep-blue Democratic cities for the safety of red Republican suburbs, Root argues, aren't doing it just so they can vote for Biden and the Democrats.

4. Gun and body armor sales are up by over 80% in NYC compared to the same period in 2019, and in many cities gun stores are backlogged with orders. Those people seeking to protect themselves are unlikely to be voting for the party which refuses to condemn the riots, is in many cases coddling the rioters, and whose presidential and vice presidential candidates want to restrict their right to own the firearms they're buying.

5. Root claims that there was a 21 point shift among non-whites away from Biden when he picked Kamala Harris as his running mate. He doesn't cite where he got that statistic, nor have I seen it anywhere else, but if it's even half-true it would be a disaster for Biden and the Democrats.

6. Surprisingly, after the orgy of Trump-bashing at the Democratic convention, the president's approval rating, according to one poll (Rasmussen), actually went up from 47% to 51%.

Anyway, I'm not sure that Root's not being a bit pollyannish in this piece. It could be that all that he says is indeed happening, but it still may not be enough to produce a Trump win. Even so, Democrats would be wise not to be overconfident.

He closes his column with this reminder:

Remember when then-President Jimmy Carter led Republican nominee Ronald Reagan by 10 points during the summer of 1980? Reagan won in a historic landslide.

Remember when Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis was up by 17 points over Republican nominee George H.W. Bush after the Democratic convention? Bush won the electoral vote 426 to 111.

It's not beyond imagining that we could witness a similar reversal this November.