True for Me but Not for You

Perhaps the most calamitous of the casualties of our postmodern age is the loss of belief in objective truth.

The notion that all truth, except, perhaps, for mathematical truths, is conditioned by race, gender and economic class has become axiomatic in contemporary discourse. What's true for you, we often hear, isn't true for me. The underlying assumption is that truth is socially constructed and subjective, and that each of us possesses our own personal truth.

I ask students in my classes for a show of hands of those who believe that something can be true for them but not for me, and it frequently happens that over half the class raises a hand.

These students, I believe, are a victim of muddled thinking. When I then ask them to give me an example of something that's true for them but not true for me they'll often say something like, "I'm 19 and you're not," or "I was born in Europe, but you were born in the U.S."

What they don't see in the examples they give is that if it's true for them that they are 19 years old then it's true for everyone that they are 19 years old. How could it be true for Joe that he's 19 but not true for Mary that Joe is 19? How could it be true for Mary that she was born in Europe but not true for Joe that Mary was born in Europe?

As I said, this is muddled. If it's true that Mary was born in Europe then it's an objective truth. It's not just true for Mary, it's true for everyone.

What I think the students really mean to say is that there are things that are true about them that are not true about others. This, of course, is quite right, but it's an entirely different proposition.

Here's another illustration of the same confusion. Sometimes we hear people say, in a rather inchoate way, that, "It's true for Joe that God exists, but it's not true for me." But, if it's true for Joe that God exists, then it's true for everyone that God exists. How could it not be? God doesn't just exist for some people and not for others.

What the speaker is actually trying to say is that, "It's true that Joe believes that God exists, but it's not true that I believe that God exists." This might well be so, but it's a different claim altogether. Moreover, if it's true that Joe believes that God exists then it's objectively true for everyone that Joe believes that God exists.

God's existence or non-existence is an objective state of affairs. His existence is not contingent upon whether anyone believes or doesn't believe He exists.

The notion that everyone has his or her own truth is really quite absurd. All of us may have our own opinions, our own beliefs, our own memories or our own eye color, etc. but no one has his own truth. Whatever is true for any of us is objectively true for all of us, even if it's not true about all of us.

The notion that truth is subjective, that it's whatever we feel strongly, and that my truth isn't necessarily your truth is a product of intellectual carelessness foisted upon us by the postmodern embrace of subjectivity. The sooner we all get over it the better off we'll be for it.

November's Vote

A friend whose political views are almost diametrically opposed to my own wrote to me recently about the upcoming midterm elections. In the course of making some valid points against the Republican candidates for statewide office he said that,

I've never been a single issue voter but I am now.... I'd vote for almost anyone who is other than those who are typical Republicans these days. And would exhort others to as well.

By "others" I think he meant me. I don't know if I'm a "typical" Republican or what a typical Republican even is, but I thought I owed my friend an explanation for my particular preference in this election so I wrote him the following apologia.

You may agree or disagree with some or all of it. Feel free to express your thoughts (courteously) via email. Here's my reply (slightly edited):

It's hard to argue with what you wrote in your recent email. I appreciate the stance you articulated in your "rant." I agree, for instance, that Oz and Mastriano are both unfortunate nominees, I voted for neither of them in the primaries and was very disappointed that they both won.

So, rather than debate the points you make let me simply explain why I nevertheless have to vote for the Republicans in this, and every election in the foreseeable future, for the sake of the country.

The way our political system is constructed we don't vote for a person so much as we vote for a party. Individual politicians only matter insofar as they give their party a majority or are at least in positions of party leadership.

Set aside, for a moment, [Democratic senatorial candidate] John Fetterman's character. If he wins in November the Democrats stand a good chance of controlling the senate and that would be calamitous, in my view, for the nation.

President Biden would have a free hand in appointing radical judges and may even get select another Supreme Court Justice flummoxed by being asked to explain what a woman is.

The senate majority would be dominated by a party a large portion of which consists of those who believe that abortion should be allowed at any point up to birth and even afterward, that men can get pregnant, that children should be mutilated in order to satisfy their gender confusion, that drag shows for children are harmless fun, that matters of sexual expression and orientation should be taught to elementary school children, that young white children should be inculcated with the conviction that they're indelibly and irredeemably racist, that sexually explicit books belong in elementary school libraries, and that parents who complain to their school boards about any of this should be designated domestic terrorists by the DOJ.

It's a party which has devastated one of the best economies in history through profligate spending and regulation, and which is mortgaging our future in their myopic opposition to fossil fuels and nuclear power before green energy becomes available and cheap.

It's a party which has created chaos on our southern border - has essentially done away with the border altogether - and then lies to us about it, assuring us that the border is "secure."

It's a party which perpetuates poverty by forcing poor kids into miserable schools and denying them an opportunity to go to effective private or charter schools.

And it's a party that has sought at every opportunity to curtail the first amendment rights of free speech and freedom of religion as well as the second amendment right to protect ourselves from the army of criminals that they've allowed to take over our streets.

Electing someone like John Fetterman to that body would simply ensure that the rate of cultural and economic decline accelerates.

Fetterman is radically pro-choice, he's in favor of open borders, he opposes school choice for the poor even though he sent his own kids to private schools. He never had a real job until he was elected mayor of Braddock, PA, living off his parents' wealth for much of his adult life.

In an act reminiscent of the Ahmaud Abrery tragedy, he once grabbed a shotgun, jumped into his pickup and chased down an innocent black jogger who he mistakenly thought had fired a gun. He then held the man at gunpoint until the police arrived.

He accosted that particular man, evidently, for no other reason than that he was black. It would be interesting to hear his reply were he asked to tell us what he would've done had the jogger just ignored him and kept on running.

His plan to reduce the prison populations by a third shows the kind of judgment he has. He once promoted the release from prison of a man who brutally hacked another man to death with garden shears and who was subsequently given a life sentence.

Mr. Fetterman actually voted for the man's release when he chaired the Board of Pardons.

He supports increased funding of public schools but was delinquent in his own personal school taxes for years.

Woodland Hills School District, which serves the town of Braddock, placed nearly three-dozen tax liens against Mr. Fetterman totaling $18,692 for unpaid property taxes from 2006 to 2019.

Add to all that the complete irrelevance of some of his ads, like the one claiming that "Oz wouldn't last two hours in Braddock." So what if Oz isn't a tough guy like the hoodied Fetterman? What does that have to do with being a senator?

Say what you will about Oz, one thing he's demonstrated is that he's smart and has done a lot of good for people in his medical career. He developed several surgical devices used in cardio-thoracic surgery and has performed numerous successful heart transplants.

I don't know that Fetterman has ever accomplished anything comparable to what Oz has.

Finally (although I'm sure I'm leaving something out), Fetterman refuses to put himself in front of the public by debating Oz until well after a lot of mail-in ballots have already been cast. He and his people know he's a weak candidate, that a recent stroke has severely affected his ability to think and speak clearly, and are counting on the media to cover for his debility like they did for Mr. Biden's cognitive difficulties in 2020.

To be sure, Dr. Oz is a carpetbagger, a publicity hound and a political novice, but even so he's in my opinion an immeasurably better choice than Mr. Fetterman, and keeping the senate out of the hands of the progressive left is an outcome the good of which far outweighs all of Dr. Oz's faults.

The Political Spectrum

An important election is seven weeks away and we'll probably be hearing a lot of talk about liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians. Unfortunately for those new to the political scene or just casual observers the terms are rarely defined so their meanings are often poorly understood.

I thought it might be helpful to correct this lack of understanding by rerunning a post (slightly edited) that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and which explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean.

This post will try to correct that omission so that as we get closer to the election readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed above denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quibble, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate or they morph into communism or fascism.

With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace.

They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. The late Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is a well-known libertarian novelist.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to lean toward libertarianism in some respects, particularly in their belief in free markets, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the federal government in Washington and giving it back to the states and localities.

They're reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are judicial conservatives.

Conservatives also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is a contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley is a well-known conservative writer.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better.

They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today.

They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those impediments. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Joe Biden presented himself as a liberal in his 2020 campaign although he has moved considerably to the left since then.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives often tend to see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives as is current VP Kamala Harris.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in an earlier presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to transfer wealth to poorer communities and reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senator Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party).

Fascism is socialist in that while fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics.

Paradoxically, so is Antifa, which is shorthand for "anti-fascist."

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything.

Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it traditionally didn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today, though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea may be the only thoroughly communist nation.

Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

Senator Bernie Sanders denies being a communist but he has throughout his life been sympathetic to communist governments, even spending his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading over the next month and a half.

Sharpshooter

The 8:00 minute video below captures the amazing abilities of a fish known as the Archerfish.

As you watch the video ask yourself how many structural and behavioral changes needed to occur in order for this fish to be able to do what it does. How many algorithmic changes had to be made in the neural wiring in the fish's brain just to enable it to adjust for the refraction of the light coming from the prey or to adjust the stream of water to adjust for distance?

Could all of the necessary mutations in the organism's genome have occurred by serendipity or does the Archerfish's incredible ability not point instead to intentional design?

Ask yourself as you watch which is a priori (that is, setting aside any prior commitment one way or another) a more plausible explanation for this phenomenal behavior, chance or intelligent engineering and programming:

Hispanics Are Finding a Home on the Right

I made the claim on VP yesterday that those, like our vice-president, who cynically insist that the border is secure while allowing millions of immigrants to cross it illegally have one of two goals in mind.

Either they're counting on the massive influx to give the Democratic party a massive majority in perpetuity or their hoping that the sheer volume of immigrants will so overload our institutions - schools, hospitals, courts, prisons, etc. - that our system will collapse under the weight.

It's possible, of course, that some are hoping for both outcomes.

Anyone who is skeptical of the above might try a thought experiment.

Imagine that everyone of these immigrants has sworn to vote Republican. What do you think the response of congressional Democrats would be? Would they not be demanding that the flow of migrants be stopped by whatever means necessary?

Actually, the thought experiment may not be too far from reality as this Wall Street Journal article by Aaron Zitner and Bryan Mena suggests:

A WSJ analysis shows that Latino communities drifted toward the Republican Party in the last presidential election. If the trend continues, it could mark a dramatic change for America’s two major political parties.

Latino voters are among the fastest-growing groups in the electorate, accounting for some 16 million voters in 2020—or more than 10% of the voter pool. Once a solidly Democratic bloc, Latino voters are emerging as a swing group available to both parties, with its voting preferences splitting along economic and class lines.

In 2020, Latino voters who backed one of the two major candidates gave Mr. Biden 63% of their vote, according to a detailed analysis by Catalist, a Democratic voter-data firm. That was 8 percentage points lower than Mr. Biden’s party had won four years earlier.

The movement away from Mr. Biden’s party was even larger—some 11 points—among Latinos who are working class, commonly defined as those without a four-year college degree.

Voters and analysts say the economic boom during much of Mr. Trump’s presidency, as well as today’s high inflation under Mr. Biden, have continued to lead to a more favorable view of the Republican Party and helped change the perception in many families that it’s socially unacceptable to consider backing GOP candidates.

This is all bad news for Democrats. If Hispanics continue to move to the right it could mean the end of the Democratic party as a dominant national force since Hispanics and African-Americans are an essential part of the Democratic base.

“The feeling that the Democratic Party almost by default is going to have the Hispanic vote—it’s not like that anymore,’’ said Ally Magalhaes, a Brazilian immigrant and aesthetician who until recently ran a spa a few miles from the Oronoz family’s home. She backed Mr. Trump in 2020 after previously voting for Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Ms. Magalhaes said faith and family were important to her—areas where she feels more aligned with Republicans. “The Republican Party is the one that represents that strongly, and that’s who we are going to be sticking with, if the Democratic Party continues to impose their progressive agenda,” she said.

She moved her two children to a charter school after local leaders considered adopting a sex-education plan that she found too explicit.

In those neighborhoods where Latino residents account for 70% or more of the population, President Biden carried 75% of the vote, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of election results at the census-tract level. That was 7 percentage points less than Democrats had won in 2016.

A Wall Street Journal survey conducted in late August found that Latino voters would pick a Democratic candidate for Congress over a Republican by 11 percentage points. That’s a narrower lead than the 34-point advantage Democrats held in 2018, according to AP VoteCast.

The Journal poll also found that working-class Latino voters are more open to backing Republican candidates this fall than are those with college degrees. Latino voters without a four-year degree picked a Democratic candidate over a Republican by 6 percentage points, while Democrats led by 26 points among Latino voters with college degrees.

If the vote shift proves durable, it could undermine Democrats’ belief that the nation’s growing racial and ethnic diversity, along with the party’s gains among white voters with college degrees, would propel it to dominance in national politics.

For Republicans, big gains among Latino voters could help them accomplish a goal that many in the party came to embrace during Mr. Trump’s presidency: becoming a multiracial party of the nation’s working class.

So, since almost 100% of the Hispanic immigrants pouring across the border are working class, how long will the shift to the right among these people continue before we no longer hear calls for a "path to citizenship," and instead start to hear calls from Washington Democrats to seal the border?

The Border Wall Would've Been Cheap

During the last years of the Obama administration there were lots of arguments over whether we should or shouldn't build a wall on our southern border.

Opponents often said that walls don't work, or that they'd "send the wrong message" about "who we are," or that they'd be too expensive.

None of those arguments made sense. Israel's wall separating it from Gaza seems to be working just fine. Who we are and what message we should be sending is that we are a welcoming country to those who arrive legally and through the proper entry points.

No one thinks, after all, that you are somehow unwelcoming or uncompassionate because you lock your doors when leaving your home or your car. The only way "locking the doors" to the country is different is in terms of scale.

The argument that it would cost too much always seemed especially laughable given Washington's willingness to spend trillions on all sorts of things we don't need, won't help and only drive up inflation.

The "cost too much" argument just suffered another humiliating refutation with the release of data that show that since Mr. Biden took office, illegal immigration has cost taxpayers four billion dollars more than completing Mr. Trump's wall would've cost if Mr. Biden hadn't canceled it.

An article at HotAir cites a study done by The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which found that the millions of new illegal aliens who have entered the country just since January of 2021 will place a more than twenty billion dollar burden on the system each year for the next ten years.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has crunched the numbers and calculated that,

The number of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. since President Biden took office will cost the U.S. taxpayer over $20 billion each year, according to a new analysis by a hawkish immigration group.

The study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for lower levels of immigration overall, calculates that the illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S. since Jan. 2021 will add an extra $20.4 billion burden a year, in addition to the $140 billion existing illegal immigrants already cost.

The analysis is based on an estimated 1.3 million released into the U.S. by immigration officials, as well as approximately one million “gotaways” — or illegal immigrants who have slipped past overwhelmed agents.

FAIR calculates that each illegal immigrant costs $9,232 a year to support.

Aside from completing the wall, what else could that much money be used for? Here are some possibilities suggested in the article:

• Giving every homeless veteran in the U.S. $50K a year for the next 10 years.
• Hire 330,000 teachers
• Provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to more than 7 million extra families
• Provide every family earning less than $50K a year a $410 grocery voucher.

In any case, opposition to the wall makes very little sense. There seems to be only one reason that the left opposes it: If we open our southern border to everyone who wants to come in either one of two things will happen that'll please the left.

Either our institutions will be so overloaded by the demands placed upon them by millions of immigrants that they'll collapse bringing about the destruction of our semi-capitalist system and facilitating the shift to a socialist or communist takeover of our government, or all those immigrants will eventually be given citizenship and will reward the Democrat party by voting fo Democrat candidates, thus ensuring a permanent Democratic hegemony.

It's hard to come up with any other reason why the chaos, humanitarian tragedy and economic burden is allowed to continue.

Imprisoned in the Friend Zone

Hans Feine, writing at The Federalist a few years back, saw at the time a very serious social problem looming on the near horizon, and his solution is going to strike some readers as odd, maybe even comical, though he nevertheless makes an interesting point. It's a point also made by the famous writer C.S. Lewis.

First, the problem:

The latest numbers on American birth rates are in, and they yield only one reasonable conclusion: All of us need to start having more babies or else the upcoming demographic tsunami will consume our nation, cripple our social programs, and leave us with a future so bleak that our only source of joy will be the moment we’re chosen to receive the sweet, fatal kiss of the Obamacare Death Panels, the Trumpcare Firing Squads, or the OprahCare Hemlock Squadrons.

Perhaps I’m overstating the danger a bit, but the point remains: Americans need to raise our sagging birth rates. One of the best ways we can do so is by reversing the trend of Americans waiting longer to get married.

So, apart from tearing down America’s institutions of higher education, which tend to slow down the recitation of wedding vows, how do we do that? It’s quite simple. We tear down the Friend Zone.

So, what does Feine mean by the "Friend Zone"?

Every year, countless young men find themselves trapped in the Friend Zone, a prison where women place any man they deem worthy of their time but not their hearts, men they’d love to have dinner with but, for whatever reason, don’t want to kiss goodnight.

Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration.

Free him to find a woman who actually wants to marry him, however, and he’ll have several more years to sire children who will laugh, create, sing, fill the world with love and, most importantly, pay into Social Security.

Feine then delivers himself of a claim that's going to strike many female readers as absurd although I think a lot of male readers might secretly agree with his defense of it:

Quite simply, for the sake of our future, the Friend Zone must be destroyed. For the Friend Zone to be destroyed, women must accept the following truths: you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends.

Here's what he means by a "friend":

By “friends,” I don’t mean acquaintances or chummy colleagues you only see at work, or friends of friends that you don’t get together with outside of a group setting, or what I call buffer-zone friends—people of the opposite sex you can be friends with because there is a significant other in between to take the romantic element out of the equation.

Rather, by “friend” I mean someone you deliberately choose to spend one-on-one time with.

His argument is that guys who spend time with girls really, deep down inside, don't want to be "just friends." They want to date. Read the rest and see if you agree or disagree with Feine.

C.S. Lewis wrote in his book The Four Loves that men and women can't be friends without the relationship devolving (or evolving) into something more. He asserts that,

When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love.

Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later.

If you're interested in reading more about what Lewis says about friendship, some of which might sound painfully archaic to modern ears, see the series of VP posts from the archive dated 2/22/10, 2/23/10, and 2/25/10.

The Problem with Scientism

Philosopher J.P.Moreland has written a fine book titled Scientism and Secularism (2018) from which some of what follows has been borrowed. Scientism is not to be confused with science, but scientists, particularly naturalist or materialist scientists, are often proponents of scientism.

Scientism is actually a philosophical view which holds, paradoxically, that science is the only reliable means of apprehending truth.

The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking famously declared in a book he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow titled The Grand Design (2010) that "philosophy is dead" and that all the answers to life's important questions, at least those that can be known, are to be answered henceforth by science.

Hawking is here giving expression to his scientism, the view that all the important questions can either be answered by science or not answered at all, and that the methodologies of science are the only valid path to truth and knowledge. All other ways of knowing must give way to the supreme authority of science, especially the natural, or "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry.

Scientism is a common view, but not only does it have some serious liabilities, the notion that science supersedes philosophy is surely false.

There are at least three things wrong with scientism:

1. It's self-refuting.
2. It's false that science is the only sure way of knowing truth.
3. It's false that philosophy is dead. If it were then science would be impossible.

Scientism is self-refuting because the claim that only what is testable by the methods of science can be trusted to be true is itself a philosophical claim. The claim itself is not subject to being tested through the methods of science. Thus, the basic claim of scientism itself must be false.

Nor can science be the only way of knowing since there are many other things we can know with at least the same level of certainty as we know any of the deliverances of science.

For example, which do you know with stronger certitude, that atoms are the basic building blocks of matter or that torturing children for fun is evil? The latter is not a scientific claim at all, it's a metaphysical claim, yet most of us are far more sure of its truth than we are of the truth of the claim about atoms.

There are other examples of things we know that do not lend themselves at all to scientific demonstration.

For example, I can know: that I took a walk on my last birthday, that I hold certain beliefs about science and philosophy, that I have an itch in my foot, that sunsets are beautiful, that justice is good; and I can know the basic laws of math and logic, e.g. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, and I know that if a proposition (P) entails another proposition (Q) then if P is true so must Q be true.

Not only do we all know such things, we know them with far more certainty than we know the truth of the claims of scientists about, say, global warming, atomic theory or Darwinian evolution.

Moreover, science depends for its very existence upon a series of assumptions, none of which are themselves scientific. All of them are philosophical, so if philosophy is dead where does that leave science?

Here are some examples: The law of cause and effect, the law of sufficient reason, the principle of uniformity, the belief that explanations which exhibit elegance and simplicity are superior to those which don't, the belief that the world is objectively real and intelligible, the belief that our senses are reliable, and the belief that our reason is trustworthy. All of these are philosophical assumptions that cannot be demonstrated scientifically to be true.

Scientism is a bid by some materialists to assert epistemological hegemony over our intellectual lives and especially over the disciplines of philosophy and theology. However, just as similar attempts in the 20th century such as positivism and verificationism fell victim to self-referential incoherence, so, too, does scientism.

The claim that science is uniquely authoritative and that we should all recognize and bow to its supremacy is quite simply false.

Russian Humiliation

Last March an arrogant, amoral Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. They thought it'd be a walkover, but they've come to realize how deeply mistaken they were.

Frustrated by a surprisingly competent Ukrainian military, trained and armed by the U.S. and other Western nations, the Russians were rebuffed, first in their attempt to take the capital, Kyiv, and then in their attempt to take eastern Ukraine.

Frustrated at their military impotence and incompetence they settled for artillery and aerial bombardments of Ukrainian cities and multiple atrocities visited upon civilians in the the towns they were able to capture.

In a U.N. report to journalists in Geneva, Switzerland it was stated that the conflict is now in its seventh month and there've been at least 14,059 civilian casualties to date, with 5,767 people killed and 8,292 injured.

These are lower estimates. The U.N. report stressed that the actual numbers are very likely to be considerably higher.

For its part, Russia has suffered approximately 80,000 casualties (killed or wounded), a catastrophic number that's more than half of the 150,000 men Russia deployed on the Ukrainian border in the February runup to the invasion.

Now the Russian army in the east seems to be collapsing under a rapid and withering assault by Kyiv's forces.

The WaPo reports that:

Ukrainian troops reclaimed more territory from Russia on Monday, pushing all the way back to the northeastern border in some places as part of a lightning advance that forced Moscow to make a hasty retreat from occupied land.

As blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags fluttered over newly liberated towns, the Ukrainian military said its troops had freed more than 20 settlements in 24 hours. In recent days, Kyiv’s forces have captured territory at least the size of greater London, according to the British Defense Ministry.

After months of little discernible movement on the battlefield, the momentum has lifted Ukrainian morale and provoked rare public criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war.

While Ukrainian cities began emerging from Russian occupation, a local leader alleged that the Kremlin’s troops had committed atrocities against civilians there similar to those in other places seized by Moscow.

Russian troop morale is doubtless abysmal, Russian military bloggers are furious at Russia's humiliation and amidst the Ukrainian jubilation at the comeuppance dealt to the Russians are fears of what a desperate and humiliated Vladimir Putin will do.

His only options at this point seem to be two: He can cut off all fuel exports to Europe and to try to subject NATO populations to a frigid winter to persuade them to stop helping the Ukrainians or he could resort to chemical and/or nuclear weapons.

If Putin decides to use low-yield tactical nuclear weapons or chemical agents, he will leave portions of Ukraine a devastated wasteland. If he employs an EMP weapon he will effectively destroy most electronic equipment in Ukraine.

The use of nuclear weapons would surely be a high risk gamble. Putin would chance mutiny among his own generals and security officials as well as guarantee that he'd be a pariah everywhere in the civilized world.

Yet, who knows what this man might do. I wrote back in February that I thought the costs of invasion would be so high that he ultimately wouldn't do it, but he did.

I'm thus very reluctant to say that he wouldn't use a nuclear weapon to try to salvage something from this unbelievably ill-conceived war, even if what he salvages is nothing more than revenge against those who have made him look like a fool and destroyed his reputation forever.

Does Science Lead to Atheism?

In an interview with philosopher of science Stephen Meyer some interesting statistics were cited.

Meyer noted that:

65% of professing atheists say that the findings of science make belief in God less probable. For agnostics, that number is in the 40s. 43% say that the findings of science make God less plausible.

And when we gave people a list of factors that were relevant in their decision to reject belief in God, the idea of undirected evolution was cited by 65% of the people who no longer believed in God, more than the number of people who cited pain, suffering, or disease.

Perhaps we might agree that if it could be shown that the universe was infinitely old and had no beginning, if it could be shown that the astonishing precision of the parameters, particles, force strengths, and constants that comprise the fabric of the universe were somehow necessitated by the Big Bang so that they couldn't be otherwise than what they are, if it could be shown that life could plausibly have emerged from non-life through purely natural processes unaided by intelligent agency, then the atheist might have some epistemic justification for his/her rejection of theism.

God might be seen, scientifically at least, as a superfluous hypothesis.

As things stand today, however, all cosmogenic theories posit a beginning to the universe and thus suggest a transcendent cause of the universe.

Also, no evidence exists for any explanation of the astronomical improbabilities of a universe emerging by chance with just the exact values for the forces, constants, subatomic particle properties, etc. that are necessary for a life-sustaining universe.

Moreover, no plausible explanation exists for how the enormous amounts of information required for the first living cell to appear could've come about through any purposeless, unguided process.

Thus, the hypothesis that the universe and life are the product of intentional, intelligent agency is at least as plausible, given the science that we have today, as the hypothesis that it's all a grand fluke.

Indeed, the fact that both fine-tuning and information are always, in our experience, the product of a mind, the existence of both of these in our universe points makes their origin in a mind an even more plausible hypothesis.

I wonder how many of those 65% of non-theists who believed that undirected evolution makes theism untenable are really aware of the science.

I wonder, too, how many of those who know the science still refuse to accept its implications because they simply don't want theism to be true.

A quote from philosopher Thomas Nagel comes to mind. Nagel wrote in his book The Last Word:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

For men like Nagel, belief in God is not a matter of evidence, it's a matter of one's will.

The Party of Science

Our Democrat friends often fancy themselves as members of the "party of science," waging battle against the forces of ignorance and superstition which they assume to abound on the right.

This charming conceit seems to be regularly refuted by facts but nevertheless persists as though it were impervious to any falsification.

The latest blow to the notion that Democrats are uniquely wedded to the hard realities of science comes in an online poll by WPA Intelligence conducted from August 22nd to the 25th. The poll found that 36% of white, college-educated female Democrats agreed with the statement that "Some men can get pregnant."

Overall, 22% of Democrats concurred.

This is astonishing. Over 1/5 of those who identify as members of the party of science are convinced that men can get pregnant even though such a prodigy has never been known to occur in all of human history, nor has anyone explained how it could occur.

It would be interesting to see the answers had the respondents been asked to outline the science behind their belief.

How, for instance, does a person without a uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries get pregnant? Has any male ever been born with this apparatus or had it transplanted into him? Do the 22% of Democrats think that these appurtenances are unnecessary in order to conceive a child?

Are they so biologically benighted that they think that all that's required for pregnancy is to somehow insert a fertilized egg into someone's abdomen.

The 22% are, in fact, exerting blind faith in an ideology that seeks to take the equality of the sexes to an absurd extreme. If men and women are "equal," the thinking evidently goes, then they're fundamentally the same, and if they're the same what's true of one must be true of the other.

Since it's true of women that they can get pregnant it must also be true of men that, despite the totality of scientific evidence to the contrary, they, too, must be able to get pregnant.QED

This is evidently the logic employed by over 1/5 of the members of the party of science.

I'm reasonably confident that many of these 22% of Democrats who insist that men can somehow, miraculously, conceive a child are secular folks who consider the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus to be absurd nonsense.

Miracles are apparently permitted in left-wing, secular progressive ideology, but it's completely unscientific and irrational to think that God could miraculously initiate a pregnancy.

It's very disconcerting to reflect on the fact that these people vote.

Update:

The Babylon Bee documents a case of a man who thought he was pregnant. Here's the video:

Understanding Naturalism (Part III)

This is the third and final installment in our series of reflections on Alex Rosenberg's essay entitled The Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. Parts I and II can be read below.

In this section Rosenberg argues that naturalism entails that there is no need to posit the existence of a mind distinct from the brain. Mind is simply a word we use to describe the functioning of the brain, just as we use the word digestion to describe the functioning of the stomach.

This claim has some interesting consequences. If all we are is matter and the matter that makes us up is constantly changing, it follows that there is nothing about us that stays the same over time. In the final analysis human beings are reducible to little more than a constantly shifting and changing bundle of perceptions.

Here's Rosenberg:

Nevertheless, if the mind just is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking ourselves seriously too.

We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time.

There seems to be only one way we make sense of the person whose identity endures over time and over bodily change. This way is by positing a concrete but non-spatial entity with a point of view somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears in the middle of our heads.

Since physics has excluded the existence of anything concrete but non-spatial, and since physics fixes all the facts, we have to give up this last illusion consciousness foists on us.

What are the consequences of denying that there is an enduring self? One consequence is surely the bizarre conclusion that we cannot be said to be the same person today that we were ten years ago. If we are in constant flux then we are a different individual than the one who went by our name in the past.

Now, if this is true it would be unjust to be held responsible for anything that other person did. In the same way that it would be unjust to expect you to keep the promises made by another person, it would be unjust to expect me to keep promises made years ago by a person who had my same name.

Marriage vows, for one example, would become worthless once people realized that it wasn't they who made them.

Furthermore, it would be unjust to punish criminals for a crime committed years ago because the person we're punishing is not the same person who committed the crime.

For those of you familiar with the movie Bourne Identity, we might ask this question: Is Jason Bourne responsible for the murder of that couple he killed in the movie if he has no memory of having killed them? Was it really he who killed them? Rosenberg would be hard pressed to explain how it would have been.

T.S. Eliot puts it like this: "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

This seems absurd, to be sure, but it is another of the consequences of naturalism that Rosenberg wants his fellow atheists to recognize and acknowledge. Little wonder that so many atheists are unwilling to stay with him on that metaphysical train all the way to it's logical endpoint.

They can see that the tracks logically terminate at a precipice and that the train is going to plunge over a cliff into the abyss of nihilism, and so, still clutching their naturalism, they jump off Rosenberg's train before it arrives at the cliff.

This is, of course, illogical, but perhaps the most illogical, irrational thing they do after having jumped off the train, after having made a completely arbitrary, unwarranted, and irrational leap in order to avoid hurtling over the cliff to which their logic leads them, they turn and point to the theists, particularly the Christian theists, whose worldview entails none of these problems, and tell them that it is they who have abandoned reason because they chose not to take the train at all.

One can only smile and shake one's head.

Understanding Naturalism (Part II)

This post is Part II (See Part I below) of our look at Alex Rosenberg's paper titled A Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. In this section Rosenberg considers whether the universe and life reflect a purposeful design.

In other words, is there any purpose to either the cosmos or to human existence? Rosenberg's answer is, no:

[A]ll of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of [atomic particles] producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.

He goes on to tackle the question whether morality can exist in a naturalistic world. He titles the section, Nice Nihilism: The Bad News About Morality and The Good News. I quote from it at length because it's unusual to find such an explicit statement of the consequences for morality entailed by atheistic naturalism:

If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life.

People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours).

Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism [the belief that science can answer all life's important questions] must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why.

Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.

There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon.

So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, it’s going to face a serious explanatory problem.

The only way all, or most, normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population.

If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected for couldn’t be a coincidence.

Scientism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences. Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality or it’s the right core morality because it’s an adaptation, or it’s not right, but only feels right to us.

It’s easy to show that neither of the first two alternatives is right. Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right.

All this should be pretty disturbing to those atheists who want to hold on to moral obligation while denying any transcendent ground for it. It's also precisely correct given Rosenberg's atheistic starting point.

Thus far Rosenberg has drawn the proper conclusions from his naturalism, but then he says something odd. Having denied any ground for distinguishing between right and wrong, he says this:

This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbears in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in the environment of hunter-gatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate our lives and social institutions.

We may hope the environment of modern humans has not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes.

There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.

What does Rosenberg mean here by imposing a value on niceness, cooperation, and altruism? Would someone who was not nice or cooperative be wrong?

A naturalist like Rosenberg cannot say he would, nor do I think he would try to say that given that he has just asserted above that, "Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right."

Such judgments of moral value are completely unwarranted in a naturalistic worldview except as expressions of personal taste.

Even more problematic is his claim that evolution has selected "in the main" for niceness, etc. I doubt that this is at all correct. Certainly this claim runs counter to human experience. There's just as much meanness and cruelty in the world as there is niceness.

That being the case, evolution must have selected at least as much for meanness as for niceness, and an atheistic naturalist simply has no grounds for saying that one is right and the other is wrong.

The most he can say is that he likes one more than he likes the other, but right and wrong are not established by our likes and dislikes.

More tomorrow.

Understanding Naturalism (Pt.I)

My classes are talking this week about the view of the world philosophers call Naturalism, so I thought it'd be good to repost a three part series on Naturalism that I wrote for VP few years ago. Here's Part I of the series:

Alex Rosenberg is an atheistic naturalist, a philosopher who holds that nature is all there is, there is no supernature. Rosenberg explains in an essay titled The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality to provide an overview of what it is that naturalists believe.

He begins with this preface:

This is a précis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality.

It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.

Rosenberg wishes to draw "the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position," as Sartre put it in describing existentialism.

He will have none of the namby-pamby naturalism of those atheists, like Hitchens and Dawkins, who think they can reject God and still cling to belief that life is meaningful, that morality exists, and that truth can be known.

Rosenberg's is a full-blooded naturalism that recognizes that all of those things are contingent upon the existence of a transcendent moral authority. His essay is a call to his fellow atheists to "man-up" and disabuse themselves of their comfortable illusions.

No God, he avers, means no genuine meaning to life, no non-arbitrary morality, and no objective truth.

He divides his essay into eight topics, some of which will be addressed here at Viewpoint over the next couple of days. His first topic is an explication of "scientism," a term that is in some disrepute but which Rosenberg wants to resuscitate. Here's an excerpt:

We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address.

But they are persistent. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science....Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality.

You don’t have to be a scientist to be scientistic.

Scientism is the view that answers to all important questions can be provided through scientific investigation. This is because everything that exists is simply some combination of matter and energy [This is a view called materialism].

Since science investigates matter and energy it will eventually find the answers to all our questions.

If one embraces naturalism [the belief that nature is all there is] then one is likely also to embrace scientism.

Rosenberg's claim here that science can answer all the important questions is surely wrong. It can't, for example, answer, or even address, the question whether we have a soul, whether there's life after death, whether altruism is morally superior to selfishness, whether God exists, what truth is, or a host of other very important matters which human beings frequently ponder.

In the next topic, titled The Nature Of Reality? Just Ask Physics Rosenberg gives a pretty clear statement of what materialists believe about the world:

What is the world really like? It’s fermions and bosons [subatomic particles], and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or “fix” all the other facts about reality and what exists in this universe or any other if ... there are other ones.

Ideas have consequences. If Rosenberg is right in saying that all that exists is matter, energy and the forces between them then several conclusions inevitably follow. Those conclusions are the topic of the remaining sections of his paper.

We'll reflect upon them over the next several days.

The Art of God

Dante Aligheri, the author of The Divine Comedy, wrote that "Nature is the art of God."

It's certainly true that there's an astonishing degree of beauty in the natural world. In fact, there's so much in nature that's gorgeous, from microscopic diatoms to the exapnse of the Milky Way, that one wonders how it is, if we're simply the product of an evolutionary process that fits us for survival, we would have evolved such a keenly sensitive aesthetic sense.

If we're the products of a purely material evolutionary process why do we appreciate beauty? After all, an appreciation of beauty is hardly necessary for an animal to survive and produce offspring, so where does it come from? How did it evolve through some unintentional, mindless process?

No one seems to know.

Indeed, the fact that we do have an appreciation of beauty, beauty that often takes our breath away, points us, perhaps, to Dante's artist.

Here's a short video whose theme is the quote from Dante and which illustrates the beauty of the earth as seen from space. The photography is spectacular, and as you watch, and as you marvel at the stunningly glorious scenes, you might reflect on how your sense of beauty could've ever come about solely through unguided collisions of atoms.

Even the most thoroughly secular folks among us should at least contemplate the possibility that there's so much beauty on earth because the earth was painted, so to speak, by an incredibly talented artist, and we were designed to be able to appreciate the artist's work.

Raising the Minimum Wage

Note: This post is a rerun of one originally written just before the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry, but it's still relevant today:

On Labor Day perhaps it's 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 them, 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.

Mr. Biden's Regrettable Speech

After serving up one of the most divisive, vitriolic, insulting and contradictory presidential speeches in the history of the Republic Thursday night, President Biden decided on Friday to start moonwalking away from it.

 
Here's part of Jim Geraghty's analysis of the speech at NRO:

Last night, President Biden delivered a prime-time address to the country from Independence Hall, warning that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” and then he talked about the importance of national unity and the need to “respect our legitimate political differences.”

One moment, Biden would warn that MAGA Republicans:

...promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country. . . .

[they’re] determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

The next moment, Biden would emphasize that, “I’m asking our nation to come together, to unite. . . . We, the people, will not let anyone or anything tear us apart.”

He warned that “MAGA Republicans” are “working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself. . . .

MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.”

Then, after warning that “MAGA Republicans” represented this dire and worsening threat and that “equality and democracy are under assault,” Biden further denounced them for being too dark and pessimistic in their vision of America: “MAGA Republicans look at America and see carnage and darkness and despair. They spread fear and lies — lies told for profit and power.”

Check the link for more of Geraghty's analysis.

One problem with the president's speech that Geraghty doesn't touch on is Mr. Biden's fondness for the term "MAGA Republican." Exactly who are these nefarious individuals out to destroy our country?

Is anyone who voted for Donald Trump a "MAGA Republican" or do only those who wear the hat qualify?

Is a MAGA Republican anyone who wants to Make America Great Again?

Shouldn't that include everyone in the country? Or is it only Republicans who want America to return to the principles that made it a shining city on a hill for millions of the world's tired, hungry and poor?

The President was asked the next day to clarify exactly who he was referring to in such vitriolic terms, terms that implicitly invite violence (If someone is a threat to our nation, after all, then the more unstable of our fellow citizens will think that sufficient reason to take up arms against them).

His response was unfortunately no more lucid than his earlier remarks.

Reporter Peter Doocy asked the president, "Do you consider all Trump supporters to be a threat to the country?" To which the president replied,

"I don't consider any Trump supporter to be a threat. I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence and fails to condemn violence when it's used, refuse to acknowledge an election has been won... That is a threat to democracy."

Not only is that a shameless bit of prevarication, not only does it plainly contradict what he said Thursday night, but it also impugns fellow Democrats like Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton, both of whom failed to acknowledge that they had been defeated in their most recent elections.

In any case, Friday's "clarification" is simply false. Here's what the president said Thursday night:

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.

Now, I want to be very clear — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.

I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.

But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.

Mr. Biden told Doocy that he doesn't consider "any Trump supporter" to be a threat after having insisted to the nation that the "MAGA Republicans," whoever they are, "represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic."

He even tweeted it, or somebody in his administration did:

"Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country."

Surely, "MAGA" Republicans, whatever else they are, are supporters of Donald Trump, and while Mr. Biden might not wish to lump all Republicans into his "basket of deplorables" he should be apprised of the fact that Mr. Trump received more votes in the last election than any other candidate in history, save Mr. Biden himself.

In other words, a vast swath of Americans supported Mr. Trump and still do. Mr. Biden has declared them to be almost terrorists.

Mr. Biden won the presidency in 2020 largely because voters believed him when he said he was going to unite the country. However, his inauguration was the high-water mark of unity.

Since then his rhetoric has been more divisive, perhaps, than that of any president in our history. Certainly it's been more divisive than that of any president since the Civil War.

Whatever his intentions may be, the practical effect of Mr. Biden's rhetoric is tearing us apart. We might wish he would just stop it.

Nietzsche and Aristotle

Most ethical systems in our contemporary world can probably be subsumed under the names of either Aristotle or Nietzsche.

Aristotle thought that human beings had a telos. There was something that man was for, a purpose or an end, for which he was on the earth. Virtuous acts were those which help men achieve their telos. 

The good life was a life which conformed to the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice - which were objectively right to live by.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, denied that there was any overarching purpose to being human and thus there was no objective moral right or wrong. Morality was all a matter of perspective.

It's a matter of how we see things, a matter of individual subjective preference.

Thus, the ubermensch or overman creates his own values. He rejects the "slave moralities" of theism and embraces the "master morality" of the Promethean man.

This is what makes men great, and great men define their own good.

Neither Aristotle nor Nietzsche believed in the existence of a personal moral law-giver, a fact which makes for an odd state of affairs.

Aristotle's telos makes no sense unless the purpose or end of mankind is somehow conferred upon man by a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, where would such a purpose come from?

But if there's no personal law-giver or telos-giver then neither humanity nor individual men have any purpose, and the "virtues" are just arbitrary conventions.

Nietzsche is right that in the absence of a transcendent, personal law-giver what constitutes a virtue is just a subjective choice.

On Nietzsche's subjectivism the virtues extolled by the Nazis are no more wrong nor right than those embraced by St. Francis of Assisi. They're just different.

If theism is correct, however, if there actually is a God who creates man and endows him with a telos then the moral law and the classical virtues really are objective and obligatory.

So, the way the theist sees it, Aristotle, by denying a transcendent, personal God, was inconsistent but nevertheless right about there being objective moral duties, and the atheist Nietzsche was consistent but wrong in his denial of objective moral right and wrong.

Will Science Survive Postmodernism?

This is the question Denyse O'Leary addresses in a column at Evolution News a few years ago. Here are a few excerpts from her answer:

The intellectual costs of metaphysical naturalism are rising rapidly.

Traditional “modern science” naturalists viewed supernaturalism as the chief danger to science. To permanently exclude the supernatural, post-modern naturalists have gone well beyond their forebears. They have thrown away reason, which is problematic because reason points to a truth outside nature. They have reinvented reason as an evolved illusion rather than a guide to truth.

And, in a cruel but inevitable irony, they liberated superstition from modern science’s jail.

For those who believe in it, reason has always provided a check on superstition. But post-moderns, who dismiss reason as a form of oppression and evidence as unnecessary to high science, cannot simply dismiss such fields as astrology and witchcraft. If everyone’s truth is as true as everyone else’s truth, scientists must lobby for their truths as an interest group in a frenzied market.

The populations most affected by post-modernism tend to be more superstitious than those that resist post-modernism. They are also much more likely to dismiss academic freedom. Contemporary science conflicts are beginning to reflect these shifts....

We hear that objectivity is “cultural discrimination” (or sexist), Newtonian physics is exploitative, mathematics is a “dehumanizing tool” (if not white privilege), and algebra creates hurdles for disadvantaged groups. And mavericks in science are a problem because they tend to be wealthy, white, and male....

We might have guessed blindly that post-modernism (anything goes!) would lead to more academic freedom. So why is it not working out that way? The problem is that post-modernism is not about freedom as such. It is the assertion that there is no truth to be sought, no facts to be found that are true for everyone. Everyone is entitled to feel as they wish.

There's more at the link, but here's her point: If there's no truth to be found through a reasoned exchange of ideas, if indeed the very idea of objective truth is an anachronism, if one's truth is merely what one feels strongly, if truth is defined as whatever works to help one group achieve its goals and purposes, then rational debate is just a waste of time.

So is any recourse to objective evidence and facts to support one's claims. One side must simply impose its ideas on all others by dint of intimidation and the exercise of raw political power. Might makes right.

In the late Medieval period whoever ruled the land determined the religion his subjects would follow. That principle, stated in Latin as cuius regio, eius religio (Whose region, his religion) in the post-modern era could be stated as cuius regio, eius scientia.

In such an intellectual climate science is no longer about discovering truth about the world, rather it's little more than a species of ideological politics.

In an environment hostile to open-minded inquiry, an environment deeply contrary to that which nurtured science from the 17th century through most of the 20th, science cannot thrive. And if science withers, so, too, will technological advance.

Unless we get over our post-modern aversion to objective truth we may well find that we're living during the high water mark of scientific discovery and progress, and the marvelous tide that has made our lives so much healthier and more comfortable than those lived by our ancestors may soon begin to drain away.

Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach described the ebb of religious faith, but what he says about religion in the modern age may be just as apt for "The sea of science" in the post-modern era:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

The Dehumanization of Women

A few days ago I did a post titled How the Sexual Revolution Harms Women. As a companion piece, so to speak, I thought I'd rerun another post from a few years ago on a related topic:

Opening the newspaper we're often confronted with what seems to be an epidemic of mistreatment of women. Stories of a campus rape culture, spousal abuse, and other examples of terrible violence perpetrated against women seem to abound, and the question this all raises is "why?".

Why do more men today, more than in previous generations, seem to hold women in such low esteem? Why are women so much more likely to be objectified today than in our grandparents' day?

I think a strong case can be made for the claim that the problem is a result of the moral revolution that took place in the 1960s and '70s concerning our attitudes toward sex and violence.

During those decades pornography was mainstreamed and with the advent of the internet it became easily accessible to adolescents. Three generations of young men have thus been raised on ubiquitous pornographic images.

This has likely had several undesirable effects.

First, it has desensitized men to sexual stimuli. A hundred years ago a glimpse of a woman's lower leg was stimulating. It no longer is because now there's much more to be seen anywhere one looks than merely a shapely ankle.

Consequently, men require stronger and stronger stimuli in order to achieve the same level of arousal as someone who's not exposed to the constant barrage of sexual images.

Because of this need for ever more erotic stimuli many men want their women to be like the women they encounter in movies, magazines, and online - they want their women to be sexually voracious playthings, and that desire often has a dehumanizing effect on women. A lot of women simply don't feel comfortable in that role, and that incompatibility can create tension in their relationships.

The man feels cheated, the woman feels cheapened and trouble results.

At the same time that pornography exploded, sex was disconnected from marriage and commitment. Many women were perfectly willing to live with men and give them all the benefits of marriage without demanding from them any kind of permanent commitment.

This suited many men just fine. When men could have sex without having to bond themselves to a woman, women were more likely to be objectified and used by men who reasoned that there was no sense in "buying a cow as long as the milk was free."

People who give us what we want may be popular as long as the benefits keep coming, but they're not respected. Respect may be feigned, of course, as long as the benefit is imminent but when the benefit no longer seems all that novel or exciting a diminution of respect often follows and results in the woman being treated accordingly.

Men are naturally promiscuous, they have to be taught to subordinate their natural impulses and to value hearth and family, but our entire culture has conspired in the last seventy years to minimize and deride that lesson.

So, when many a modern man, unfettered by any profound commitment to a particular woman and children, grows accustomed to the woman he's with she may begin to bore him, and it won't be long before his eye is cast elsewhere in search of another potential source of sexual excitement.

Along with the decline of traditional sexual morality in the 60s and 70s was the emergence of a radical feminism that castigated the old Victorian habits of gentlemanly behavior. It became quaint, even insulting, for a man to give a woman his seat on a bus or to open a door for her.

Men who had been raised to put women on a pedestal - to care for them, provide for them, and protect them - were told they were no longer necessary for a woman's happiness. In Gloria Steinem's famous phrase "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

The more vocal feminists also made it clear that women no longer appreciated being treated differently than men. Thus our entertainment culture began depicting women in movies as just as raunchy, coarse, and proficient at killing and mayhem as men, and the idea of a woman being an object of special respect and courtesy because she needed male protection and care became risible.

This, too, dehumanized women by eroding the esteem in which their gender had formerly been held among men.

As with sex so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a Bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent. Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they are exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it.

When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males undergoes a shift toward that line, spilling many more men onto the other side than would have been there otherwise.

This affects women as much as men, if not moreso, because women are often the victims of male violence. As men become more inclined to violence, as they lose respect for women, as our culture portrays women as sexually insatiable playthings, women become increasingly the victims of male lust, anger and aggression.

It would be well for any young woman who is beginning to get serious about a young man to find out how much of his time he spends on violent movies and computer games and what he thinks about pornography. She'll learn a lot of very valuable information about him if she does.