Will Roe Go?

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case which has the possibility of resulting in the overturn of Roe v. Wade. SCOTUS will probably deliver their judgment in late June or early July.

Roe is the 1973 decision in which five justices found lurking somewhere in the Constitution a right for women to kill their unborn babies if they so chose.

A lot of folks on the pro-choice side of the abortion debate are concerned that the present Court will find that no such right exists anywhere in the Constitution, and a lot of people on the pro-life side are equally concerned that the Court will manufacture some reason not to overturn Roe.

I'm not a legal scholar, but for my part I can't imagine that the Founding Fathers inserted language into some Constitutional nook or cranny that endowed women with such a right, and a lot of pro-choicers agree, including the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who acknowledged that Roe was bad law.

The role of the Court is to rule on what the Constitution says, not on what the justices wish it said or imagine it to say, but that seems to be what they did in 1973 when, in an act of legal prestidigitation, they produced from the Constitutional hat a right to abort a pregnancy.

In any case, if Roe is overturned it will not end abortion in America, but it will return to each of the states the responsibility of deciding what restrictions, if any, they wish to place on it. Some states will permit abortion on demand up until birth, maybe even after. Others may prohibit it almost entirely. Most will land somewhere in the middle.

The point is that it will be left to the people of each state to decide, through their legislatures, what they want the law to be. This is how a democratic Republic is supposed to work.

By overruling the states in the Roe decision five Justices on the Supreme Court stripped millions of citizens in this country of the right to determine their own laws on an issue the Court had no Constitutional warrant for removing from the purview of the states.

As Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) writes:

It [the abortion controversy] won’t be settled for a few years. But then it will settle. This path—overturning—is the closest America will get to justice and democratic satisfaction on this issue. Overturning Roe would mean returning a furiously contested national issue of almost 50 years standing to the democratic process.

This wouldn’t “solve” the problem or “end” the struggle. It would bring the responsibility for solving and ending it closer to the people. In the short term it would cause new disruption and renewed argument, as Roe itself did when it negated abortion statutes in 46 states and the District of Columbia.

... It will take time to play out. Politicians who stray too far from true public opinion, as opposed to whatever got burped up in a recent poll, will fairly quickly face backlash at the polls.

It's possible that the Court chooses to allow Roe to stand in some form, but if they don't overturn it now they're just kicking the can down the road, ensuring continued cultural battles and guaranteeing that many more cases come before them in the future.

Who Designed the Designer?

Philosopher of science Jay Richards is a proponent of intelligent design, i.e. the view that the universe and life show evidence (lots of it) of having been intelligently engineered. Richards asserts that one of the most frequent objections he encounters, one raised in fact by Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion is, "If the universe and life are designed then who designed the designer?"

Laypeople can be forgiven for asking the question because it seems common-sensical, but someone of Dawkins' stature should know better and he took a lot of heat from philosophers, even philosophers sympathetic to his metaphysical naturalism, for his evident lack of philosophical sophistication.

Here's a short video in which Richards addresses the question:

It's worth noting, I think, that the attempt to use this question as an indictment of the intelligent design hypothesis is misguided for other reasons besides those Richards gives.

Let's look at the first part of the question: "If the universe and life are designed...." implies a willingness to accept for the sake of argument that the universe is designed, but as soon as he's granted that the naturalist has gotten himself into trouble.

Once it's conceded by the naturalist, even if only hypothetically, that the universe is designed then whether there's just one designer or an indefinite number doesn't much matter. Naturalism would stand refuted since naturalism holds that the universe is self-existent.

Moreover, to posit more designers than what's necessary to explain the universe is a violation of the principle that our explanations should contain the minimum number of entities necessary to explain what we're trying to explain - in this case, the universe. So the simplest, and therefore the best, explanation is that there's only a single designer of the universe.

There's no good reason to think that anyone who believes there's a designer of the universe must allow for an infinite regress of designers.

We might also point out that the universe is a contingent entity. Now contingent entities require a necessary being as their ultimate cause and a necessary being is, by definition, not itself dependent upon anything else for its existence.

So, if the universe was designed by a non-contingent being then it makes no sense to ask what designed that being. Nothing designed it. If it were designed it would be contingent upon whatever designed it.

Finally, it should be noted that if there is an intelligent designer it must not only be a necessary being, but it must also transcend space and time because these are aspects of the designed universe. Therefore, the designer must be non-spatial and non-temporal. It must also be very intelligent and very powerful. In other words, it must be something very much like God.

Given all this, the naturalist would be better off resisting the temptation to ask "who designed the designer." It's a question which carries far less polemical punch than they think it does.

Unthinkable in Fifty Years

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week on a case out of Mississippi that could very well overturn Roe v. Wade and/or Casey v. Planned Parenthood. If that should happen the laws governing abortion abortion would then be left to each state to decide.

The Court's decision will probably not be announced until late June, but the controversy surrounding the possibility that the current abortion regime may be undone brought to mind a post I did a couple of years ago which featured a claim by an English professor and writer named Karen Swallow Prior who argued that fifty years from now abortion will be "unthinkable."

Here's the post:

Vox.com has been running a series in which guests are invited to offer their opinion on something commonly experienced today that they think will be considered unthinkable in fifty years. Some sample selections are "eating meat", "youth tackle football", "self-driving cars", etc.

In her submission, English professor Karen Swallow Prior believes that just as we look back today at chattel slavery and wonder how people could ever have justified the idea of owning other human beings, fifty years from now people will shake their heads as they look back at the practice of abortion on demand.

Here's the lede for her argument:

The list of those who have had few or no legal rights throughout history is staggering: women, children, orphans, widows, Jews, gays and lesbians, slaves, former slaves, descendants of slaves, those with leprosy, undocumented immigrants — to name a few.

Nothing marks the progress of any society more than the expansion of human rights to those who formerly lacked them. I believe that if such progress is to continue, prenatal human beings will be included in this group, and we will consider elective abortion primitive and cruel in the future.

The eradication of abortion may be difficult to imagine. But consider how difficult it would have been for our grandparents to foresee a culture in which nearly one in four women has an abortion by age 45. Certainly, some factors leading to this situation reflect real and substantial progress for women: greater equality, more work options, improved understanding of sexuality, and increased moral agency.

But rights for women that come at the expense of unborn children aren’t true liberation; they merely, as one writer put it, enable the “redistribution of oppression.”

Prior goes on to make the case that a fetus is a human being entitled to the same rights as humans which have been born and that pro-choice advocates tacitly acknowledge this when they declare that they want abortion to be "safe and rare." Why should it be rare if it's just a benign medical procedure like an appendectomy? Who would bother to insist that they want appendectomies to be rare?

It's also ironic that those who declare themselves firmly on the side of science will twist themselves into pretzels denying the science that shows the tiny form in the womb to be a developing child.

Ultrasound technology and prenatal surgical interventions provide dispositive scientific evidence that what's in the mother's womb is not some alien blob of tissue and extravagant gender reveal parties and the insuppressible personality of the child in the womb offer psychological confirmation to an increasing number of mothers that what they're carrying is in fact a baby.

Prior concludes with this:

Our modern-day willingness to settle for sex apart from commitment, to accept the dereliction of duty by men who impregnate women (for men are the primary beneficiaries of liberal abortion laws), and to uphold the systematic suppression of sex’s creative energy and function are practices that people of other ages would have considered bizarre.

As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.

When we do, we will look back at elective abortion and wonder — as we do now with polluting and smoking — why we so wholeheartedly embraced it.

We will look at those ultrasound images of 11-week old fetuses somersaulting in the waters of the womb and lack words to explain to our grandchildren why we ever defended their willful destruction in the name of personal choice and why we harmed so many women to do so.

It will be interesting, for those still around in fifty years, to see whether abortion will be to those alive then what slavery is to us today.

Interested readers can peruse Prior's full column at the link.

The Left's Race Problem

Recently a white cop shot a 61 year-old man in a wheelchair, in the back, nine times. The man had shoplifted and refused to cooperate with the officer and so the officer shot him. Nine times. In the back. It was pretty much a one day story in the media.

There was no consequent violence in the streets, no calls to defund the police, no outpouring of grief for the shoplifter.

Several days ago a man named Darrell Brooks drove his vehicle into a crowd at a Wisconsin Christmas parade, killing six, including an 8 year-old child:

Investigators allege Darrell Brooks Jr., 39, turned into the parade route in Waukesha on Nov. 21 and swerved the vehicle side-to-side without slowing down as he struck dozens of people.

That was a two day story. There was no talk about race or racism in the progressive media, despite the fact that Brooks' social media was filled with racial hate and vitriol.

So why the reticence? In the first case a white cop shot and killed a white wheelchair-bound victim. The media evidently saw no opportunity to use this incident to incite racial animosities so they quickly lost interest.

In the second case, the driver was black and the victims were all white, but this, too, did not fit the media narrative of a virulent white supremacy stalking the land looking for black victims. So after a day or two they let pretty much let the story fade out.

So here's your homework assignment: Imagine in case number one that the wheelchair bound victim had been black, and imagine in case number two that the races of the driver and his victims had been reversed. What do you suppose the media reaction would've been then, and what would the state of our cities be as you read this?

It probably doesn't take much imagination to picture the difference in the media's reaction to these horrors were the circumstances as we imagined them, and, if the response to the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake are any indication, it's quite likely our cities would be ablaze right now.

Which might lead one to wonder why our major media yawn at crimes that would have them churning out condemnations and deprecations of white society had things been the other way around.

Is it not itself racist to be relatively indifferent to murders that would elicit moral apoplexy were the races reversed, and isn't this unequal treatment at best irresponsible? Is it not a contributing source to the deep racial resentments and polarization in our society when the crimes of whites are maximized and similar crimes perpetrated by blacks are minimized?

And why is so much of our society so eager to racialize everything that they were calling Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist despite the fact that there was nothing at all racial about the shooting in which he was involved?

Jason Riley (I shouldn't have to mention that Riley is black, but in today's climate I guess I better) writing at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) says this:

The same press outlets that portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as a white supremacist have had remarkably little to say about the racial identity of Darrell Brooks, the black suspect in Wisconsin who is accused of plowing his car through an annual Christmas parade last month and killing six people, including an 8-year-old boy, all of whom were white.

Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters.

Race is all anyone would be talking about if a white man had slammed his vehicle into a parade full of black people. Yet suddenly the left has gone colorblind.

Liberals want us to believe that racial disparities in police shootings and incarceration rates stem from a biased system and have little to do with racial disparities in criminality. They want to talk about so-called hate crimes that involve white assailants and black victims, but not those involving black assailants and white or Asian victims.

They want headlines to read “White Cop Shoots Black Suspect,” even when there’s no evidence that the encounter was racially motivated. This is playing with fire.

Riley's right, and no amount of rationalization by those on the left can excuse the irresponsibility of their tendentious behavior.

A Short Presentation on the Moral Argument

As has oft been stated here on VP there's an argument to be made for the existence of God based on the near-universal belief that there are objective moral duties which we're all obligated to perform.

The argument, put simply, goes like this:

• If there is no God there can be no objective moral wrongs, duties or obligations.
• There are objective moral wrongs, duties and obligations.
• Therefore, there is a God.

By "objective moral wrongs" is meant something that we have a duty not to do regardless of whether or not we believe we have that duty.

Those who wish to avoid the conclusion of this argument will often challenge one or both of the premises. They'll argue contra the first premise, for example, that objective moral duties exist independently of God because they result from our evolutionary past, or are derived from human reason or from human conscience.

This short video featuring Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft considers these and other objections to the Moral Argument and finds them all inadequate. None of them can provide a satisfactory ground for objective moral duties.

The only satisfactory basis for objective moral rights and wrongs is a transcendent, perfectly good moral authority who has the power to hold us accountable for how we live. Here's Kreeft:

In other words, if one believes there are objective moral duties but also believes there's no transcendent ground for those duties, there's an intellectual tension in their worldview. One of those beliefs must be false, but it doesn't seem plausible that the first one is.

Nature, Nurture and the Epigenome

Philosophers, psychologists and scientists have long debated whether our behavior is largely the product of environmental influences (nurture) or mostly the consequence of our genetic make-up (nature). Modern discoveries in biology have confirmed the suspicion of many that it's probably a combination of both.

Research on rats suggests that environment can actually change an animal's genome (the genetic composition of an organism) and thus influence much of its behavior.

The part of the genome that appears to be affected by environmental factors is not the actual DNA, which is the chemical basis for our genes, but rather molecular tags (called methyl groups) that attach along the DNA and act as switches turning certain genes on and off.

These tags are collectively referred to as the "epigenome," and this five minute video explains how it's believed that the environment affects these elements of our genetic make-up.

The mystery, at least it's a mystery to me, still remains how the proteins coded for by our genes translate into behavior. How do strings of amino acids generate a behavior like licking the young, building a specific type of nest or migrating to a specific tree thousands of miles away (see yesterday's post)?

There must be some connection between physical proteins and an organism's behavior, but if it's known I've never seen it explained.

The "Miracle" of Monarch Migration

Every year an estimated 100–200 million monarch butterflies migrate two thousand to three thousand miles between the United States/Canada and Mexico. While there are other populations of monarchs, including in western North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Australia, the population in eastern North America is the best known because of its amazing migration.

Monarch Butterfly

For example, they're the only butterfly species known to make a two-way migration.

They can travel between 50 to 100 miles a day during their 3000 mile journey to Oyamel fir forests in the Mexican mountains nearly two miles above sea level.

They roost in the trees in a dozen or so of these mountain areas from October to March, often returning to the same tree in which their ancestor roosted the previous year.

In late summer in northeastern North America dwindling food supply and shorter days trigger the Monarch's migratory impulse. A generation that has hatched after mid-August begins the trek south for wintering grounds they've never been to before. Most summering Monarchs live for about two to six weeks, but this migrating generation can live up to nine months.

The migrants travel during the day and roost at night, often in the same trees that previous generations used as roost sites during their migration.

During the summer their range covers close to 400,000 square miles, but when they finally arrive in Mexico they squeeze into territories of less than half a square mile.

Monarch's roosting in Mexican Oyamel fir trees

One of the most amazing aspects of this is that these butterflies, with brains the size of a pinhead, can navigate so unerringly across thousands of miles of terrain. Researchers believe that they use a complex system which involves ultraviolet sunlight, a magnetic compass, the position of the sun and an internal clock.

Their internal clock tells them the time of day. In the morning when the sun is rising they navigate to the west of it. At noon they fly toward it and in the afternoon they fly to the east of it. This strategy keeps them flying due south as depicted in these figures:

Another amazing fact is that the generation that made the long trip from the northeast and over-wintered in Mexico is not the generation that returns to the northeast. This generation begins the trip back in the spring but they reproduce and die along the way.

The second generation continues the migration, but they, too, reproduce and die along the way. It's the third generation that makes it back to the summering grounds in the northeast, but they also reproduce and die, so it is their offspring that begin the cycle all over again in August.

There's an interactive feature here that shows the Monarch's pattern of migration. All of this raises questions:

How does each year's crop of butterflies "know" the route to take to get back to the same trees in Mexico that their ancestors left from when they've never done it before?

How do those butterflies born along the return trip "know" to continue the migratory flight and "know" which direction to take?

What is the source of the information needed for these insects to complete this astonishing journey?

And how would all this have come about through a blind, purposeless process like natural selection and genetic mutation?

Comparisons of migratory monarch genomes with the genomes of non-migratory monarchs has revealed that some five hundred and thirty genes are involved in migratory behavior so that means that in the history of the species there must have been a minimum of five hundred thirty genetic mutations, all of which were random but which fortuitously produced the ability to successfully make this migration.

Moreover, Monarchs are believed to have evolved about two million years ago so the migrating variety must've split off from the ancestral stock sometime thereafter. Thus, at the most, those 535 mutations must've accumulated within the last two million years, a very short time for all that evolution to have taken place - at least it's a very short time if the evolution were unguided by any outside intelligence.

If this all came about naturalistically that would be almost miraculous, which is ironic since naturalism discounts miracles.

It's possible, of course, that this migratory behavior could've evolved by unguided, purposeless processes, in the same sense that it's possible that elephants could've evolved the ability to fly, but it takes a king-sized portion of blind faith to dogmatically insist that it did.

Media Disinformation

Gerard Baker at WSJ offers a catalogue of stories that have been promoted by the progressive media in recent years, all of which turned out to be false.

According to so much of what we read and heard:

• Kyle Rittenhouse is a domestic terrorist.
• Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist.
• Donald Trump won in 2016 only because he colluded with the Kremlin.
• Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington Catholic High School on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was an entitled white bigot.
• Mr. Trump said the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville were “good people.”
• Last year’s riots were mostly peaceful.
• Unarmed black men are routinely shot in huge numbers by police officers.
• The discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plot.

Every one of these assertions by the media was false. So were these:

• Inflation isn’t a problem.
• Andrew Cuomo was America’s greatest governor.
• Republican-run states are killing people with their anti-science Covid policies.
• A white man killed a succession of Asian-Americans in Georgia in a fit of racist rage.
• Russians offered cash bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers.
• Anyone who suggested the pandemic started in a Chinese laboratory was a racist.
• Mr. Trump’s postmaster general was stealing mailboxes.

Baker could've added many more examples, including the media's willingness to believe Jussie Smollett and, in 2006, Crystal Magnum in the Duke lacrosse case.

The stories were false and the media that perpetrated them often knew they were false, but they kept pushing them anyway. If it were the case that this only happened occasionally and that when it did the media were quick to correct their story, that would be forgivable, but that's obviously not what usually happens.

As in the Trump/Russia collusion case the media pushes the falsehood until they can no longer sustain it and then they quietly move on to the next fabrication. No apology, no regret, and usually no retraction.

It's why the late Rush Limbaugh often likened them to drive-by shooters who leave their victims bleeding in the street while they speed off to find their next victim.

Why do they do this? There seem to be three possible answers. Either they're simply not very bright, or they're not very honest, or they're maliciously trying to tear people, and our institutions, down by any means necessary.

A fourth possibility is that they're actually all three.

In any case, it'd be folly to naively accept whatever we hear on network or cable television, or read on social media and in the major leftist journals. Too many of these people are unconstrained by any sense of a duty to tell the truth.

It may be hard to believe that they would lie to us so deliberately and so earnestly, yet when it happens over and over again with rarely, if ever, any sign of remorse or indication of professional embarrassment one has to be at least suspicious that the falsehoods are deliberate and that we are being purposely deceived.

Perhaps the best response is not to give up trying to know what's going on in the world but rather to develop a healthy skepticism, especially toward those sources of information which have a track record of promoting stories and allegations which later are shown to have been false.

Credibility, after all, is something that must be earned and scrupulously maintained. Too much of our media has squandered any reputation they may have had for integrity and forfeited the trust of honest, thinking people.

Another Gift Suggestion

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out four years ago.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore, MD and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century …. They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look. They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

A Modest Christmas Gift Suggestion

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our seventeen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-sized university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the individual perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It's often said that ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

Gratitude

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans observe today is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the significance of gratitude:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope that for all our readers (including even those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) today will be a day filled with gratitude, love and joy.

How Thanksgiving Became Official

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. However, on September 28th, 1863 a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861 he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, though, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation only to become permanently an American custom and institution."

Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864 letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, the actual proclamation was written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to raise money to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.

They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads quite as if it could have been written today, particularly the penultimate paragraph.

I hope we all give thanks tomorrow for our many blessings, remembering especially as we express our gratitude to God and to each other those who suffer and grieve and that our thanksgivings make tomorrow a wonderful and meaningful day.

Ms. Pelosi's Ethical Misunderstanding

In a press conference last Thursday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared that there's "a moral obligation for us to hand this planet over to the next generation in a responsible way."

“For me," she stated, "it’s a religious thing: I believe this is God’s creation, and we have a moral obligation to be good stewards.”

So far, so good. It's a standard Christian theological position that the creation has been placed under man's stewardship and that we have a duty to properly care for it.

But then Ms. Pelosi added that those who don't share her belief that God has laid upon humanity the duty to care for the earth nevertheless still have an obligation to do so: “If you don’t share that view you must share the view that we have an obligation to future generations."

Here, regardless of what we think about climate change, green energy, etc., we might raise a philosophical eyebrow. Speaker Pelosi believes that God has imposed a moral obligation upon us to keep the planet healthy, but what has laid that obligation upon us if those who don't share the view that it was imposed by God are correct?

What is the source of a moral duty to future generations if not God? Why should people today not just live for themselves, maximize their own comfort and well-being and let future generations fend for themselves?

Indeed, we might harbor a deep concern for our great, great grandchildren's well-being but from whence comes an obligation to do so?

Ms. Pelosi makes a common mistake in her press conference. She assumes that God is just one source among others of objective moral obligations whereas in fact, God is, and can be, the only source of objective moral obligations (An objective moral obligation is one which exists whether or not we believe it does).

If God doesn't exist or is irrelevant to how we live, then living just for oneself is not wrong in any moral sense. There's no obligation to sacrifice for others, especially others who will not be born for another hundred years.

If one believes that we do have such obligations as Ms. Pelosi describes, then, like her, one should be a theist since objective moral obligation does not sit at all comfortably or consistently in a naturalistic worldview.

The Speaker would've been on firmer ground had she said something like, "I believe God obligates all humanity to care for the planet and that God will hold us responsible for how we treat the planet. You may not share that belief but God obligates you nonetheless."

That may've sounded a unpleasantly dogmatic to contemporary ears, but it would've had the merit of making more sense than assuming that there could be some other source of a duty to care about the well-being of future generations.

Ten Lies about Rittenhouse

As protests break out in cities across America in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal one wonders how many of the protestors have fallen for one or more of the falsehoods about the case that have been perpetrated by our media.

In a column written before the verdict was announced, Miranda Devine at The New York Post wrote about ten false claims that have appeared in either print, broadcast or social media, all of which were debunked in court.

She opens with this: Of all the willful lies and omissions in the media’s coverage of the Steele dossier, Brian Sicknick, the Covington kids, Jussie Smollett, the Wuhan lab, Hunter Biden’s laptop and so on, nothing beats the evil propaganda peddled about Kyle Rittenhouse.

They try to make the Rittenhouse case about race, but it’s about class, punching down at the white working-class son of a single mother because they don’t see him as fully human, and it makes them feel good.

They lie about him because they can.

The central media narrative is that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist whose mother drove him across state lines with an AR-15 to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. All lies.

“A white, Trump-supporting, MAGA-loving Blue Lives Matter social media partisan, 17 years old, picks up a gun, drives from one state to another with the intent to shoot people,” was typical from John Heilemann, MSNBC’s national affairs analyst.

Here's Devine's list. Every one of these claims, to which she provides links, has been shown to be false. Read her column for her explanations:

1. He killed two black BLM protesters.
2. He lived out of state and had no connection to Kenosha.
3. He illegally took an AR-15 across state lines.
4. He illegally possessed the rifle he used.
5. His mother drove him across state lines to the riot.
6. He was an “active shooter” who took his gun to a riot looking for trouble.
7. He's a “white supremacist,” as then-candidate Joe Biden labeled him in a tweet showing the teenager’s photograph.
8. He “flashed white power signs” with Proud Boys.
9. He wore surgical gloves “to cover his fingerprints.”

Right up there among the most ridiculous allegations Devine lists is her last, that the judge in the case, Judge Bruce Schroeder, "is a 'Trumpy' racist biased toward the defense." Here's what Devine says about this canard:

This slur is based on the fact he would not let the prosecution use the term “victim” — common practice when the jury has not ruled on a case.

He told a lame joke about Asian food for lunch being held up by the supply-chain crisis, and his phone’s ring tone sounds like a 1980s ditty played at Trump rallies. Ridiculous.

In fact, Schroeder is a Democrat, has run as a Democrat for the Wisconsin Senate and was first appointed by a Democratic governor.

Bias was also perceived in what the Chicago Tribune said was his “highly unusual” decision to allow Kyle to draw names randomly out of a container at the end of the trial to determine which 12 of the 18 jurors would decide his fate. [But that's] something this judge always does, he told the court.

Devine makes an interesting point in her conclusion:

On the second day of jury deliberations Wednesday, the judge railed against media distortions, although he seemed most aggrieved about attacks on his reputation, rather than Kyle’s. He threatened to stop trials from being televised, but that’s exactly the wrong solution.

Only because the public was able to hear the evidence for themselves did they become aware of the malevolent dishonesty of the media coverage, which has threatened a fair trial and ensured riots if Kyle is justly acquitted.

It's contemptible, actually, that so many supposed professionals in the media are apparently more interested in smearing people they don't like, even if they ruin the life of an 18 year-old kid, than in reporting the truth, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised. It's the same thing they did to high school student Nicholas Sandmann two years ago, the Duke lacrosse players before that and numerous others in between. One might almost think that there are a lot of people in our media who hate young, white, right-leaning males.

Penfield's Dualism

The debate over whether what we call "mind" is actually an immaterial substance that's not reducible or explicable in terms of matter (i.e. the brain) or whether the term "mind" is simply a term of convenience that's merely used to describe the function of the brain has very accomplished advocates on both sides.

Materialists or physicalists (those who believe that every phenomena in the universe has an ultimate explanation in some material substance or some physical law) hold that mind is either something produced by the brain or is just a function of the brain, much like digestion is a function of the stomach.

Dualists believe that the mind is a completely distinct substance that somehow interfaces with the material brain but is not reducible to, or explicable in terms of, brain function.

One neuroscientist/neurosurgeon in the mid-20th century who started out as a materialist and, as a result of his professional experience, was moved to become a committed dualist was a man named Wilder Penfield who was one of the preeminent scientists studying the brain.

Contemporary neurosurgeon Michael Egnor writes about him in an essay in which he describes two lines of evidence which led Penfield to abandon materialism: Penfield .... pioneered the surgical treatment of epilepsy using stimulation and recording from the surface of the brain in awake patients undergoing brain surgery. This was possible because the brain itself feels no pain, and the scalp can be anesthetized with Novocain-like drugs to render the surgery painless. This surgery is still being done today.

Penfield was especially interested in the relationship between the brain and the mind. He began his career as a materialist and he ended it as a passionate dualist. He based his dualism on two observations:

1. There are no intellectual seizures: Seizures are sporadic electrical discharges from the brain and they cause a variety of symptoms, from complete loss of consciousness to focal twitching of muscle groups, sensations on the skin, flashes of lights or noises, smells, and even intense memories or emotional states.

Penfield could record these electrical discharges from the surface of the brain. Penfield noted that there are no intellectual seizures. That is, there has never been a seizure in medical history that had specific intellectual content, or abstract thought. There are no mathematics seizures, no logic seizures, no philosophy seizures, and no Shakespeare seizures.

If the brain is the source of higher intellectual function, as is widely believed, why in medical history has there never been a seizure that evoked abstract thought? This fascinated Penfield, and he inferred quite reasonably that the reason there are no intellectual seizures is that abstract thought does not originate in the brain.

2. Free will cannot be simulated by stimulation of the brain: Part of Penfield’s research was to stimulate the motor areas of the brain, which caused patients’ limbs to move during surgery.

He was the first surgeon to map the motor areas of the brain in this fashion. In doing this, he noticed that patients always knew the difference between stimulated movements and movements that they freely caused themselves.

Penfield would ask patients to move their limbs freely whenever they chose, and he would (without telling them) stimulate their limbs to move. Patients always knew the difference between movements freely chosen and movements caused by the surgeon.

Penfield could never find a region of the brain that simulated free will. He concluded that free will is not in the brain — it is an immaterial power of the mind.

The question whether we have an immaterial mind (or soul) is not just an academic issue. If materialism is true, if we are purely material beings, then it becomes harder to justify a belief that there's anything about us that survives the death of our bodies. It also becomes harder to believe that we have free will, and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

Ideas have consequences and the consequences of where we stand in the debate between dualism and materialism are profound.

The Rotting Fish

First Things editor R.R.Reno has a column (paywall) in the latest issue in which he outlines why so many Americans are very concerned about the future. He traces the trajectory of our decline in foreign, economic and cultural policy and puts the blame squarely on the elite ruling class.

Concerning the decline of our culture he says this:

In 1960, 8 percent of births were illegitimate .... Today, the rate is 40 percent. Liberalization of laws in the 1970s led to dramatic increases in divorce. Today, divorce is somewhat less common, but that’s only because fewer people are getting married in the first place.

Yet, as Charles Murray has documented [In his excellent book Coming Apart], the destructive trends in family life do not characterize the upper classes.

A neo-traditional ethic holds firm for people at the top, even as they promote the next stages of liberation, which will further disintegrate social norms.

Moral deregulation does most of its damage to middle-class and working-class Americans. If your mother has only a high school diploma and you were born in 2021, the odds are against your being raised in an intact home.

A similar class divide can be seen in chronic unemployment, lack of social involvement, and substance abuse. Our leadership class has worked overtime to liberalize attitudes, even to the point of enforcing a punitive political correctness.

The well-educated and well-off have the resources and resilience to navigate the new cultural landscape. The less fortunate are shipwrecked.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2020. It is telling that our policy response to COVID-19 was to shut down the country and spend trillions of dollars to ease the damage.

Meanwhile, our policy response to 100,000 dead from drug overdose—an epidemic that has killed nearly a million people since 1999—has been to legalize marijuana.

At this juncture, a bipartisan consensus obtains in our ruling class.

The rich and powerful believe that we live in a degraded and broken country filled with dependent and dysfunctional people. It’s interesting to note that angry voters agree.

They just differ about whom to blame for the all too real and very deep problems facing our country. And I submit that ordinary people, not the well-credentialed people running things, have the more accurate political philosophy. They see that a country becomes de-industrialized, degraded, and dysfunctional because its ruling class has failed.

Put simply: A fish rots from the head down.

Strong words, but it's hard to argue with them especially if one has read Coming Apart.

It's the frustration of the middle and working classes that produced Trump's victory in 2016 and that frustration has surely increased given the sheer incompetence on display over the past ten months by the current administration.

Little wonder that Democratic analysts fear a disastrous mid-term election a year from now.

Darwinism and the Fossil Record

The latest video in the Science Uprising series tackles the question of whether the fossil record actually supports Darwinian evolution.

Darwinian evolution, or more properly, Neo-Darwinian evolution, posits that all living things evolved into their present form through a long, gradual and purposeless process of random genetic mutations, natural selection and genetic drift, a process that was completely unguided.

In other words, Neo-Darwinism is a materialistic and naturalistic explanation.

The following video, however, makes the point that there just wasn't enough time for this to have happened, at least not naturalistically. Nor does the fossil record, which is characterized by numerous sudden leaps, provide evidential support for any gradualistic theory of evolution.

So, if human beings and other species of living things did get here through an evolutionary process, that process was neither random nor unguided. And if that process was directed and guided then it must've been superintended by a Mind.

It's really hard to escape that conclusion, but watch this 9 1/2 minute video and decide for yourself:

Living with the Incoherence

Readers of Viewpoint are doubtless well-aware that I think the question of how we ground our moral beliefs is of paramount importance.

They're doubtless aware, too, that we live in an era in which some secular folk are extremely judgmental of the behavior of others, to the extent that they're willing to destroy the careers of those who deviate from what the censorious deem morally acceptable opinions or behavior.

One of the ironies of this is that the most judgmental people in our society are often secularists or non-theists yet these are the very folks who should be the most non-judgmental of all.

I say this not because I think that non-theists (or naturalists) are more noble than others but because a naturalistic worldview, which naturalists presumably embrace, offers them no basis for making any judgment at all about the moral rightness or wrongness of other people's behavior.

Here's why:

Humanity, generally speaking, shares a basic moral understanding (i.e. that loyalty is good, betrayal is bad; kindness is good, cruelty is bad; honesty is good, dishonesty is bad, etc.). This understanding seems to be inherent in human beings as though it were somehow inscribed on our DNA.

Granting that this is so, how do we explain the existence of this basic moral understanding?

There are, it seems, two possibilities. Either we've acquired this understanding through an impersonal, unguided, naturalistic process like Darwinian evolution, or we've acquired it through the intentional act of a creator (i.e. God).

There's no plausible third option. It seems that naturalism and theism exhaust all the possibilities.

Suppose then, that the answer is that we've evolved this moral understanding naturalistically. If so, then what makes acting against this understanding "wrong"? How can blind, purposeless, impersonal processes like gene mutation, the accidents of genetic drift, and natural selection impose an obligation on us today to live according to a moral understanding that evolved to suit us for life in the stone age?

Moreover, if evolution is the source of our moral sentiments then it's also the source of our propensity for selfishness, violence, and tribal hatreds. That being so, if a propensity for kindness and a propensity for cruelty have both evolved in human beings, why should we assume that it's right to be kind and wrong to be cruel?

If we insist on making that assumption then we must be comparing kindness and cruelty to some higher standard that transcends our evolutionary history, but naturalism admits of no such higher standard.

On the other hand, if that moral understanding - call it conscience - is instilled in us by a perfectly good, all-knowing creator of the universe who both loves us and has the authority to insist that we act in accord with that moral understanding, and if that creator also possesses the power to hold us accountable for how we live, then we have a good reason for thinking that we have an objective duty to live according to what our conscience tells us is good and right.

On naturalism we can certainly intuit that we should be kind rather than cruel, selfless rather than selfish, but we have no obligation to follow those intuitions. Human nature being what it is we're often pulled and tugged in a direction opposite to what we think we should go, and in a naturalistic universe there's no compelling reason why we should resist those tugs. It's not morally wrong to yield to them.

In sum, if naturalism is true then ethics is just a bunch of socially fashionable and arbitrary conventions which have no real moral binding force.

If theism is true, though, there can be genuine moral right and wrong and genuinely objective moral obligations.

Anyone who believes that we have a moral obligation to do justice and to show compassion to the poor and oppressed should, if they're consistent, be a theist.

If they're a non-theist and nevertheless maintain that there are objective moral obligations they're irrationally importing those beliefs from an alien worldview (theism). Their own worldview offers no basis for them.

It's one of the more remarkable features of our times that so many secular people who pride themselves on their intellectual perspicacity either don't see this or don't mind living with the incoherence.

How to Wreck an Economy

Prior to the pandemic Americans were enjoying one of the best economic environments in our history. Then the plague hit and knocked everything cattywampus. Eventually, we started to climb out of the pandemic and the economy began to regain its footing. Then came the election of 2020 and economic progress came to a screeching halt.

Now it looks like we're headed for one of the worst economic periods in our history.

Our supply chain appears broken, store shelves are barren, employers can't find workers, and worst of all, inflation, all but negligible for the last decade, is skyrocketing, negating whatever wage gains workers have made over the last several years.

The Biden administration seems helpless to do anything to meliorate the situation and oddly determined to make the problem by worse by hamstringing the energy industry.

Tristan Justice at the Federalist comments:

From day one President Biden has done everything in his power to suppress home oil and gas production leading to the price shocks Americans are coping with today.

Biden took an axe to the Keystone XL Pipeline, put pressure on Wall Street to cease investment on new projects, banned drilling in the Arctic, and suspended new oil and gas leases on federal land.

At the same time, Biden gave the green light to a new Russian pipeline into Germany, repeatedly begged OPEC to raise output, and demanded American oil producers lower costs after the administration’s cascade of expensive regulation. It’s not that Biden has no plan to bring down power prices, it’s that Biden is implementing a plan to keep them going higher.

The administration admitted this week another pipeline supplying more than half of Michigan’s propane needs is on the chopping block, even as propane users face the steepest spike in heating prices this winter.

The United States was,just a year ago, a net exporter of energy. Now we're pleading with the Saudis to increase oil production.

National Review's Jim Geraghty asks how "a country that became a net-energy exporter in 2019 and 2020 and that had cut its dependence on foreign crude oil by more than 50 percent from 2016 to 2020, is reduced to pleading with OPEC to increase production."

A lot of Americans are also wondering "why an administration that so desperately wants other countries to produce more oil seems so implacably hostile to the U.S. producing more oil."

Geraghty elaborates:

More than a few observers have pointed out the irony that a president who campaigned on pledges that “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels,” and “We’re going to phase out fossil fuels” is now calling on Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, and the rest of OPEC to increase oil production.

And unsurprisingly, OPEC likes high prices and is in no rush to bring them down, as the Wall Street Journal reported. In fact, they think prices might go significantly higher by next summer:

Foreign producers are also benefiting from rising prices and fearful of oversupplying the market, giving them little incentive to cooperate.

“We must keep the price. Iraq needs the money . . . for its stability,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said in an interview last week. He predicted oil might go as high as $120 a barrel by next summer, up from about $80 currently.

It’s not just OPEC; Wall Street analysts such as those at Bank of America think gas prices will be 45 percent higher than now by June 2022. That would calculate out to a nationwide average price of about $4.94 per gallon.

$5.00 a gallon gasoline would be catastrophic for many Americans, especially those living on limited incomes. Not only would it affect personal transportation, but since everything we buy, including food, is brought by truck, and since trucks use gas, the price of everything is going to continue to rise.

Moreover,

... people don’t just use crude oil for their cars; home heating oil is another significant use. The EIA projects that “The 4 percent of U.S. households that heat primarily with heating oil will spend 43 percent more — 59 percent more in a colder winter and 30 percent more in a warmer winter.”

But don’t think you’re off the hook if your home uses natural gas or propane:

“We expect that the nearly half of U.S. households that heat primarily with natural gas will spend 30 percent more than they spent last winter on average — 50 percent more if the winter is 10 percent colder-than-average and 22 percent more if the winter is 10 percent warmer-than-average.”

The only homes not getting walloped by price hikes will be those using electricity for heat, but the EIA projects that even those homes will see a 4 to 15 percent price increase.

This is all a consequence of the president's wish to prove his green energy bona fides and appease the progressive wing of his party. He may succeed in getting a pat on the back from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, at least for a time, but he'll do so by devastating the financial well-being of millions of Americans.

Mr. Biden received the votes of more Americans than any candidate in American history, but I'm sure that very few of them thought they were voting to make the U.S. more like Venezuela.

Advice for Millennials and Gen Zers

In a column in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Mary Eberstadt claims that Millennials and Generation Zers have been robbed. They've been bamboozled by our progressive elites into believing that their country is "an irredeemable cesspool of racism and bigotry."

Consequently, only a third of Millenials and Gen Zers will acknowledge that they're "extremely proud" of their country. She invites these Americans to ask themselves why.

Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our families. Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our neighborhoods. Think about that the next time someone trash-talks your national home and neighborhood, your country.

One such figure, impresario of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” says she has never regarded herself as “particularly patriotic.”

Another, whose sulfurous racialism permeates elite education, says that he has never felt free in the U.S., even as his every grievance is celebrated and subsidized. If they have such a low opinion of America, what makes you think they care about Americans—including you?

This is particularly ironic given that the United States is by almost any measure not only the greatest country in the history of civilization, but it's the greatest country in history in which to be a minority. There's never been any other place in the world where minorities have more opportunity to flourish than they do here.

It's why tens of thousands of Central Americans, Haitians and others from around the globe risk their lives in an arduous trek to get here.

Eberstadt continues, arguing that today's younger Americans have also been robbed of two great sourcees of immaterial wealth, "the consolations and joys of family life" and the rich benefits that accompany religious belief:

Generations of thinkers have disparaged the family as the enemy of utopian schemes. In their depictions, home and hearth amount to a slaughterhouse of dreams and aspirations, especially for women. To the contrary: Unprecedented rates of abortion, fatherlessness and divorce, far from liberating you, have subtracted actual and potential loved ones from your lives. No wonder surveys show that young people are the loneliest Americans....

...[Moreover, religious belief has inspired] the greatest art and science, architecture and music and human creation at large that our species has ever devised. Permanent membership in “none of the above” secularism risks relinquishing your own cultural inheritance: Western civilization.

"This brings us," she declares, "to the political choice before you. Today’s neo-Marxism and identity politics seek to co-opt your youthful energies into a lifetime of performative rancor. Is that what you want?"

Good question. To be permanently angry, to be permanently focused on racial, sexual or LGBTQ identity is to dissipate one's human potential by expending it on relative trifles. It's to spend one's life judging books by their dust jackets.

Eberstadt concludes with this:

Young people are designed by nature to love and to be loved with energy and magnanimity.

Today’s misanthropes tell you the opposite: that humanity is a toxin on the planet, unworthy of reproduction. This counsel couldn’t be more wrong—especially for you. If loneliness is the problem, putting more people in your lives with marriage and children is the self-evident solution.

The left tells you that your fellow citizens are racists, fascists, sexists, bigots and haters. This relentless negativity obliterates youthful hopes. It shrivels the youthful imagination. Worst of all, it shrinks your hearts.

When young people have it constantly drilled into them that their fellow Americans are the odious individuals they're often portrayed as, it makes despising them seem appropriate. So far from treating them with dignity, respect and kindness it becomes much easier to treat them with self-righteous contempt and hatred. Sadly, though, people who choose to live this way will find that Eberstadt is right.

A life spent judging others on the basis of what one perceives to be their politically incorrect sins, a life lived in a semi-permanent state of anger, bitterness, hostility and contempt, is a life in which happiness will prove very elusive.