Vital Remnants

$10,000 bucks says this won't be the last time Romney commits a gaffe

2012-02-02T20:10:00.000-05:00

Wait a minute. I thought it was Newt Gingrich who was supposed to embarrass conservatives.

Newt doesn't win Florida

2012-01-31T22:24:00.001-05:00

I am waiting to hear from my detractors about my post last week in which, a week ahead of the event, and after considering carefully various sophisticated metrics, and constructing a wide variety of charts and graphs, I called the Florida Republican primary race for Newt Gingrich. Having been inspired by both CNN and Fox News having called South Carolina before a single vote was tabulated, I decided to follow suit.

If Anderson Cooper could do it, so could I.

But, alas, Newt Gingrich did not win the race. Instead Mitt Romney, one of the remaining two monogamous candidates left in the race, was victorious (Santorum was the other monogamous candidate, but something about his monogamy was not, apparently, quite as appealing to Florida Republican voters).

"What happened?" my detractors will ask. "You blew it. How can you show your face after this ignominious prediction?" Well, they wouldn't say exactly that, partly because I don't think they know what the word "ignominious" means.

Still, I would like to address what went wrong.

I have thought a lot about my method of predicting the outcome of the Florida race over the past 5 minutes, and I have conducted a thorough review over that time of the methodologies I employed in making my prediction. After doing this extensive analysis and producing several long reports, I have determined why my forecast was incorrect.

The problem was that my method was entirely too scientific.

I explained when I made the prediction that, if my prediction was false, it would therefore be falsifiable, and since (as many of my detractors like to point out) falsifiability is a sufficient criterion for a method being scientific, I will consider it proven that my method was, in fact, scientific.

So from here on out, I will go back to the method that sustained me so well when I predicted in 2008, the day after the Iowa primary, that Obama would win the nomination and the general election, putting him hin the presidency; the method that stood me in such good stead (if I can talk about my own state now) when I predicted, on the basis of a few conversations and my gut feeling, that Greg Stumbo would win the leadership race in the Kentucky State House for Speaker.

What method was this? Prophecy. Plain and simple. I will now go back to divine inspiration as my chief mode of political forecast.

You can all go back to your homes now.

PRESS RELEASE: Governor trying to "shift blame" on doomed gambling measure

2012-01-31T18:00:00.000-05:00

For Immediate Release
January 31, 2012

LEXINGTON, KY--"The Governor is trying to shift blame from his own inept handling of the now doomed gambling bill so that he can blame it on someone else," said Martin Cothran in response to Beshear's comments today accusing Senate President David Williams of "intimidation." Beshear is trying to blame David Williams for the demise of the constitutional amendment to expand gambling, said Cothran, "but the fault lies squarely with the Governor."

Cothran said the Governor's delaying tactics are what has ultimately doomed the legislation. "He said he would have a bill out three weeks ago. Instead, he keeps delaying. He originally said he would have it out in early January. Now we're into February. He keeps saying 'next week' and 'in a few days.' He's done this so many times now that lawmakers are having a hard time taking him seriously."

"This is the longest drum roll we have ever seen," said Cothran.

The group said Beshear would not be alienating Senate President David Williams unless he had already given up on his own bill. "You don't insult the head of the chamber you're counting on to pass your bill unless you have already given up on it yourself," said Cothran. "If there was any doubt that the gambling bill was already dead, his comments today should have settled it."

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PRESS RELEASE: Governor "bluffing," gambling bill is dead

2012-01-31T12:00:00.004-05:00

For Immediate Release
January 31, 2012

LEXINGTON, KY--"If the Governor thinks he has the votes he needs, he ought to tell us who they are," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation, after Gov. Steve Beshear's claimed Monday that he had 23 Senate votes to pass a constitutional amendment to allow casino gambling. "The Governor says he sees 23 votes. We think it's a mirage. I've had legislators who are in favor of this bill tell me they don't think it has the votes.

"The Governor is bluffing," said Cothran.

"The clock has run out on the gambling bill," he said. "As far as we can tell, this thing is dead. The Governor has waited too long to introduce it and we don't see how he can resuscitate it at this point."

"Support for this bill has been slipping away for several weeks. If he introduces it now, it will be the first time a new model has been unveiled just as the wheels were falling off."

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PRESS RELEASE: Family Foundation files open records requests with Governor's office, State Police

2012-01-31T09:00:00.001-05:00

For Immediate Release
January 31, 2012

LEXINGTON, KY--The Family Foundation today filed open records requests with the office of the Governor and the Kentucky State Police asking about meetings and correspondence between the Governor's office and casino interests in the formulation of a constitutional amendment to expand gambling in the state.

"We think there should be full disclosure about the individuals and the wealthy corporations who may have been involved in the attempt to rewrite Kentucky's Constitution," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group.

Cothran said he thought many Kentuckians would find it disturbing if it turned out that wealthy horse tracks and casino corporations were heavily involved in changing the Constitution in a way in which they stood to financially benefit. "People don't want their laws written in smoke-filled back rooms by millionaire businessmen whose names they don't even know," he said. "This process needs to be out in the open."

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Group calls for Governor to release names of those involved in "secret meetings on gambling legislation"

2012-01-30T07:00:00.001-05:00

For Immediate Release

January 30, 2012

LEXINGTON, KY--The Family Foundation today asked for Gov. Steve Beshear to release the names of the people involved in negotiations on the constitutional amendment to legalize gambling. "We think the Governor needs to tell Kentuckians who has been involved in the secret back room meetings to rewrite Kentucky's Constitution," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group.

"We think the public needs to be reassured that there were not wealthy casino interests involved in writing themselves into our state's Constitution," he said. "We need to keep corruption and cronyism out of this process."

Cothran said he thought that if horse tracks were involved in writing a bill in which they had a financial interest, it could doom the bill altogether. "This legislation is already in trouble," said Cothran. "If we were to find the fingerprints of some wealthy casino corporation like Churchill Downs on this legislation, it could drive a steak through the heart of this bill."

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Distributism 101: Is predatory capitalism a conservative doctrine?

2012-01-28T23:00:00.001-05:00

There are some so-called "conservatives" who are really liberals.

The Bain controversy is the perfect case study to illustrate the distinction at the center of the economic school of thought called "Distributism." And it is a case study in the Fallacy of the Appeal to the Aggregate that seems to infect the rhetoric of a lot of people who call themselves "conservative."

The Bain controversy, let us remember, involves Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's involvement in Bain Capital, a private equity firm. As a private equity company, Bain has invested in numerous companies and, in the course of its regular business, employees were laid off and jobs were outsourced.

In our last installment of Distributism 101, I discussed the Distributist distinction between theoretical and applied economics. "On the one hand," said Hillaire Belloc, "theoretical economics focuses on the way economics laws work. On the other hand, applied economics tell us what the economic state of affairs ought to be."

What people like Romney do to justify their own individual actions in pursuing profits is to clothe themselves in the mantle of "conservatism." But in doing so, they confound the two modes of economic thought: Whatever "works" economically, they seem to suggest, is ipso facto the way it ought to be.

Furthermore, among such people the definition of what "works" is always cast in aggregate terms: if an economic action produces greater aggregate income or greater aggregate employment, etc., then it is automatically considered to be the result the individual ought to pursue.

To propound this doctrine on a policy level is one thing. There, it has a certain air of plausibility--although it is still not unproblematic. But to propound it on the personal level, as Romney has done, is to completely confound both economic and ethical categories.

To say that your personal action is right because it contributes to the greatest good of the greatest number may or may not be the doctrine of Adam Smith, but it is certainly the doctrine of John Stuart Mill. More specifically, it is the doctrine of utilitarianism, the doctrine of which Mill was the most prominent historical exponent. And to acquiesce to such arguments in the name of conservatism is to imply that conservatism itself is a utilitarian doctrine, which it most certainly is not.

The problem, of course, is that there are people running around calling themselves conservatives who are spouting economic utilitarianism and don't seem to realize it, and Romney is one them.

Predatory capitalism is not a conservative doctrine. It is economic utilitarianism, and economic utilitarianism is the soul of liberalism properly so-called. American political rhetoric has developed in a rather strange way and has seen the term "liberal" turned into a reference to someone who believes in socialism. "Liberalism" used to mean--and still does mean in Europe--someone who believes in economic freedom.

In fact, I think partly because of the changed application of the word in American politics, we seem to have come up with a new word to mean what "liberal" used to mean: libertarian. I suppose it gets us out of the problem of calling people we think of as conservatives "liberals."

When Romney was called out for this, out came all the libertarians who have convinced people that they are conservatives to defend him: David Boaz at the Cato Institute, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, and Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity.

But, as I have pointed out on this blog before, libertarianism is not conservatism. In fact, pure libertarianism is almost the exact opposite. This is why social conservatives (the ones who really understand their social conservatism, anyway) should have a troubled conscience in making common cause with libertarians. I'm not saying they should never do it. Sometimes the predations of socialism require it. But we shouldn't forget that conservatism is ultimately inimical to libertarianism. And I'm afraid we forgot that some time ago.

People who think it is right to lay people off and outsource their jobs purely for the purpose of padding their own profits are not conservatives. Conservatives are about conserving things--things like families and communities. This requires an acknowledgement of the efficiencies of the free market in subordination to common good, to which the efficiencies of the free market are sometimes blind.

The extreme individualist utilitarianism that is espoused by some people who want to call themselves "conservative" is corrosive of these things.

They are utilitarian capitalists, which is another word for "liberal."

Monotheists for Romney

2012-01-25T21:00:00.000-05:00

A number of people, including several of my friends, are saying they cannot vote for Newt Gingrich because of his past marital infidelities. I addressed this in a recent post and pointed out that God seems to be far more concerned with a public official's religious beliefs than it does about how many wives a public official has had (David, Solomon)--or whether he has committed sins of the flesh outside of marriage (Abraham).

In the Old Testament, polytheism is dealt with far more harshly than polygamy or even adultery.

In this connection, I pointed out that Mitt Romney, being a Mormon, is necessarily polytheistic. So why (the question was implied but not made explicit) were my friends taking the position that Christians should not vote for Gingrich, but were not taking the position that Christians should not vote for Romney?

It was an a fortiori argument: "from the stronger." If one can vote for Romney, despite the fact that the reason for not voting for him was (Biblically speaking) stronger, then why can't one vote for Gingrich?

I am, admittedly, a Monogamist for Gingrich. I am going to begin calling my pro-Romney friends "Monotheists for Romney," just to underscore that they are not applying similar standards to their own chosen candidate.

Hopefully, they will still like me.

"Gambling bill may already be dead," says anti-slots group

2012-01-25T12:00:00.001-05:00

For Immediate Release
January 25, 2012

LEXINGTON, KY—A spokesman for the Family Foundation today predicted that if the Governor did not release his expanded gambling proposal by the end of the week, the issue would effectively be dead this session. "By the time the Governor and his friends in the gambling industry finish divvying up all the millions of dollars they think they're going to pocket through this legislation and come out of their smoke-filled room over in the Capitol building, this whole thing will be over," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group. "In fact, the gambling bill may already be dead."

"Support for the gambling legislation is collapsing faster than a ten dollar tent in a hurricane."

"They didn't have the votes to begin with, and now what little support they have is deteriorating by the day," Cothran said. He said there was a widespread impression among lawmakers that the expanded gambling effort has been plagued by confusion and dissension among expanded gambling supporters. "I think a lot of people are just fed up with the infighting and lack of action and want to move on to other things."

"A lot of legislators, even those who would otherwise support it, are already moving on," he said. "Of course we oppose this bill, but if we were supporters, we would be wondering who was in charge here and what happened. Why was an initiative that seemed like a sure thing when the session started all but fallen apart? This should have been introduced three weeks ago. We're trying to imagine what it's going to look like when a page from the Governor's office comes running down the Senate aisle with a bill draft in his hand just as the President of the Senate is gaveling the 2012 session to a close. They have only themselves to blame."

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Advocacy group calls expanded gambling effort "badly handled"

2012-01-24T12:00:00.001-05:00

LEXINGTON, KY—All seems quiet on the gambling front, a phenomenon that has one group wondering how the effort to bring casino-style gambling to the state seems to have stalled, and possibly died altogether. "At first we were worried about an all-out assault from the gambling industry, but now we're wondering if a bill is ever going to materialize," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation.

"This started out looking like it was going to be The Empire Strikes Back, but now it seems more like Waiting for Godot."

Cothran said this was "one of the most badly handled legislative initiatives we have ever seen." He said his group is thankful for the Governor's mishandling of the effort, but he is still surprised nothing has happened given all the money the gambling industry has already spent trying to throw its weight around.

"By the time this bill gets introduced, it will be past its expiration date. We are now into the fourth week of the legislative session. If this bill had been introduced two weeks ago, it may have had a chance. But we think their window of opportunity is gone." He said he thinks the session has already "passed this issue by."

“Not only do they not have the votes in the Senate, but they are losing support by the day."

"Gov. Beshear and his friends in the gambling industry have had a whole year to try to put something together for legislators to look at. But here we are, into the fourth week of the General Assembly, and they can't even decide what they want. They're essentially jerking lawmakers around. We think the patience of most legislators has run out."

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Should we not vote for Gingrich because of his past marital problems?

2012-01-24T00:41:00.003-05:00

My good friend Francis Beckwith asks the following question, which he calls "uncomfortable and awkward," about Newt and Callista Gingrich on his blog today:

So, let me ask it again in a more extended fashion: Are conservative Christians, who believe in the morality of the natural law and all that it entails about marriage, family and civil society, prepared for America to have a First Lady who was a home wrecker and was once the President’s mistress, with her husband as the national standard bearer for the causes of life, conjugal love, and the common good?

This is a legitimate question, and my answer to it is that I would rather not have such people--sinners--occupying the White House. Adultery is a violation of one of the Ten Commandments and is a mortal sin. On the other hand, I would rather not have a person who is a polytheist in the White House either. Mormonism is essentially polytheistic, a violation of another of the Ten Commandments, and also a mortal sin.

I would far rather have a non-sinner in the White House. As soon as anyone spots one, I'd like to know about it.

But there is an important difference between the two scenarios above--the Gingriches and the Romneys. It is that the former are repentant, and the latter are not. And so I'm not clear on how unrepentant and continuing violation of the first commandment is less problematic than the repentant violation of the sixth commandment.

In fact, if we are looking for God's own attitude toward the relative sinfulness of these two particular sins--polytheism and polygamy--it is not too difficult to see where the greater problem lies. God frequently penalizes individuals--and the nations they lead--for committing the former, but does not seem to have much of a penchant for penalizing an individual or nation for the latter.

In fact, if multiple marriage disqualifies one for public office, it is instructive who is thereby disqualified. We can start with David and Solomon. In fact, it would be an interesting question to consider how a guy with 700 wives would do in the Republican primary. In fact, with the kind of extended family that implies, one wonders if there would be any way he could lose.

I do not believe that the relatively greater divine distaste for polytheism over polygamy is an indication that polygamy was morally acceptable, but it does seem to pose a serious problem for anyone who wants to argue that serial monogamy (which it seems is less of a sin than polygamy) is any more problematic than polytheism.

I have pointed out elsewhere that I agree that character matters, but that I also think that conversion matters more. Not only has Gingrich publicly admitted that what he did was wrong, but as a Catholic convert, you have to do this little thing that involves going into a little room and spilling out your guts--including sexual sins--in detail to a guy on the other side of a panel, who, once you are finished, absolves you of your sins.

I too, like Beckwith, wish that Gingrich had been a little more contrite in his answer--as he has already been when he has discussed this elsewhere. I too, like Beckwith, think he should have been more sensitive about the pain he caused his wife. Maybe St. Augustine was being a little too self-obsessed himself when he said pretty much the same thing about the concubine he abandoned--it pained him.

In fact, it kind of bothered me that Ronald Reagan was a divorcee.

This is not a trivial problem. Gingrich's past bothers me. So does Romney's present. Maybe Santorum's future should concern me as well--he seems pretty squeaky clean so far, but who knows.

One of them will win the Republican nomination and face Barack Obama, who, incidentally, is neither a serial monogamist nor a polytheist.

Should I vote for him? It's an uncomfortable and awkward question.

Joe Paterno: The good guys eventually win

2012-01-23T07:00:00.002-05:00

Joe Paterno was one of the good guys. In fact, he was one of the greatest of the good guys in modern college sports, and--if you read carefully about the recent Penn State scandal--you will realize that nothing that occurred in the Sandusky child molestation case diminishes Paterno as a coach or as a person.

One story a football coach friend of mine once told me encapsulates much about Paterno as a coach and as a man. It was the 1987 Fiesta Bowl, which pitted Penn State against Miami. Miami that year had a hot quarterback by the name of Vinni Testaverde. The game is now legendary for the contrast between the two teams. Miami was a team that had earned its reputation as a band of thugs. As someone put it, they were the "Oakland Raiders of college football.

And they were furthermore run by a coach who had no business coaching students: Jimmy Johnson, who later went on to coach the Dallas Cowboys and who has thankfully retired from coaching. He personified everything that is wrong with modern college footbal. The thugishness on the team was something he apparently didn't discourage.

The game would be a contest between the good guys and the bad guys.

The Hurricane players decided to dress the part--in military fatigues. In a pre-game steak fry, to which both teams were invited, Penn State players ribbed the camo-bedecked Hurricanes about their coach, among other things. The humorless Hurricane players walked off in a huff, one remarking, "Did the Japanese sit down and eat with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them? No. We're outta here." The team walked out.

"Excuse me," said a Penn State player. "But didn't the Japanese lose the war?"

When the Penn State players arrived for the game, they stepped off the bus--dressed in suits. As they made their way to the locker room, Johnson's thugs were there to greet them. Paterno referred to both these incidents in his wonderful, Paterno: By the Book:

"I don't know whether Jimmy helped his kids plan their disgraceful walkout. ... But I know he was there. Nor did he raise a finger of caution when we were climbing out of our bus for the locker room as his team ... just about blocked our path, waving and taunting and yelling, 'We'll get you, you mothers.' (I'm only using half their word)."

Paterno cautioned his players, telling them to expend their energy on the field.

After having lost to Oklahoma the previous year in the Orange Bowl, Paterno's players wanted a win, and the attitude of the Miami players made them want it even more.

The game did not start out well for the Nittany Lions. Their quarterback, who had trouble finding any open receivers, was pummeled. Their ground game was in a funk. At one point they fumbled, a mistake which gave Miami a touchdown. Penn State got one of their own, resulting in a 7-7 tie at the half.

But the Hurricane's offense wasn't doing well either. The much vaunted Testaverde couldn't get anything going, despite the undersized Penn State safeties, which the Hurricanes had ridiculed before the game as "smurfs." It began to become apparent to Miami's offense that the Nitanny Lion defensive backs hit. Hard. And even though Penn State's offense kept stalling, Miami began turning over the ball. In the fourth quarter, Testaverde threw to the wrong places, and when he threw to the right place, his receivers dropped the ball. But Miami still managed a field goal, making it 10-7.

Peterno himself was not worried. His philosophy was that you win with defense, and second with special teams. All the offense had to do was not hurt them. This is exactly what happened.

Testaverde, shaken and confused by Penn State's shifting schemes, threw the ball right into the hands of a Penn State defender, who ran it to the Hurricane's five yard line. On the next play, the Penn State quarterback went in for a touchdown. The score was 14-10, and that's how the game ended.

The good guys had won.

When the board of Penn State basically fired Paterno, they sacrificed him on the altar of their own reputation. Rather than do the right thing to the man who had done so much for the university and its players and students, they did the easy thing. Paterno was 85 years old and suffering from health problems. He had already resolved, in order to make things easier for the university, to retire at the end of the year, which was shortly approaching. The board should have left it at that. It didn't.

Paterno called what he did at Penn State a "grand experiment." What was the experiment? It was a simple recipe: "Success with honor." This he accomplished not only by being a moral example to his players, but by doing something that too many college and high school coaches fail to do--some by simply not even trying: ensure their players do well academically.

Penn State football players not only had to perform on the field, they had to perform in the classroom. He produced 37 first team all-Americans. In 2010, the team sported an 84 percent graduation rate, a rate too rare in college athletics. And the emphasis Paterno gave to academics didn't end with the players on the team. He gave millions of his own money and money that he raised to improve Penn State's academic programs.

It is interesting to note that while the Penn State football stadium is named after a former governor, the library is named after him: The Paterno Library.

The scandal itself was not Paterno's fault. Nobody even pretends that it was. He did what he was supposed to do, reporting what little had been reported to him by Mike McQuary to school officials the next day, one of whom was the head of the campus police. But as soon as the scandal was announced, the Monday morning moralists swung into action, spouting casuistry as they came. Local police had known about Sandusky since 1998, but let it go.

And some of the criticism had come from ESPN, which itself had sat on a recording it had of a conversation with the wife of Syracuse assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine, revealing something of the man now charged with charges similar to those against Sandusky--a recording they sat on for years.

Within a matter of hours, the reputation of Paterno who been the paragon of propriety and virtue in a world characterized by two little of either was in tatters.

Even before the report of Paterno's death, the wheels were falling off the moral case against Paterno. Mike McQuery, who witnessed what we know now to have been child molestation recently testified that he didn't tell Paterno all that he had seen. And the board is now being battered by charges from its own alumni that it did Paterno wrong.

He was told of his firing in a phone call from a board member. It was cheap. It was tawdry. And it was entirely without class.

Paterno's reaction to what was done to him, on the other hand, was as classy as the rest of his career. "You know, I'm not as concerned about me," Paterno told one interviewer. "What's happened to me has been great. I got five great kids. Seventeen grandchildren. I've had a wonderful experience here at Penn State. I don't want to walk away from this thing bitter."

He said he was not bitter, although he had every right to be. He wanted everyone to understand that this wasn't a football scandal. "I'm not worried about me. I think the courts will have their decisions as to what happens. That's where I want to leave it. I want to leave it on a high note and let the legal process do what they got to do."

The Sandusky scandal happened to Paterno in the fourth quarter of his life. He was 85 years old, having been head coach for 46 years, and having served at Penn State in other capacities for more years than that. The scandal put him behind as he approached the final minutes.

But Paterno was a devout Catholic Christian who believed that the game doesn't end here. Despite the fact that you are behind as you near the end is not reason to give up hope. It was a message he told his players again and again over the course of his storied life.

Joe Paterno was a good guy, and good guys eventually win.

Vital Remnants calls the Florida Republican primary

2012-01-22T14:34:00.002-05:00

If Fox and CNN can do it, why can't I?

Vital Remnants is now calling the Florida Republican primary for Newt Gingrich. No, we don't have any actual returns in yet. And, yes, the primary does not actually occur for another week. But I watched both Fox News and CNN call the South Carolina primary before any returns had actually been reported, so my own attempt at augury is not unprecedented.

First, Fox called the race purely on the basis of exit polling before any precincts had reported. I then turned to CNN, to see if they too had called the race without actually knowing how people voted. There, Anderson Cooper and another analyst were explaining very carefully why they weren't calling the race at that moment. So I turned back to Fox. Then, about five minutes later, I turned back to CNN where they too, despite not having any returns yet, had called the race.

Clearly CNN felt pressure because Fox had already called the race and didn't want to look. So I'm going to get a jump on all of them and call Florida.

Just as Fox and CNN have their sophisticated metrics on the basis of which they make their predictions, so do I. My procedure is to read the newspapers, take a sip of coffee, check out certain websites, take another sip of coffee, take a nap, watch some coverage of the race on TV, and go get some more coffee. I then go for a walk. After watching a movie (preferably a Western), I go chop some wood for my wood stove.

I then get out my calculator, add up some numbers and come to a total. These numbers are basically random and the total they come to has absolutely nothing to do with anything whatsoever, but they give the whole analysis a vague and dreamy scientific feeling which, after all, is the basis for much of social science.

I am then ready to make my prediction, a prediction which generally depends on how optimistic or pessimistic I am feeling about my preferred candidate (which in turn is affected by how much coffee I have had).

Today, I am feeling good about Newt Gingrich after he won South Carolina yesterday. Should my optimism forsake me in the days leading up to the actual primary in which there will be actual returns based on actual votes by actual people, I may revise my announcement retroactively. This too is not unprecedented.

There may be some who think this procedure is unscientific and partisan, to which I respond that it is entirely within the realm of scientific method. After all, my procedure can be verified through the tried and true scientific process of employing the fallacy of affirming the consequent: if my prediction proves true, it counts as evidence for the validity of my procedure. If it proves false, on the other hand, then it is obviously falsifiable, which, according to Karl Popper, the scientists' favorite philosopher of science, is the criterion for the scientific, broadly conceived.

Gingrich. Florida. Trust me on this.

Pastor prays against gambling before Governor's speech to advocate it

2012-01-17T23:29:00.000-05:00

Rev. Herschel York, a Frankfort, KY pastor and the former head of the Kentucky Baptist Convention gave the prayer tonight before the Governor's budget speech. He prayed for help for Kentuckians to "to foster salaries, not slot machines, to build cars, enable jobs, not license casinos." That was just before the Governor argued for fostering slot machines and licensing casinos.

Oh, and State Sen. Kathy Stein (D-Lexington) didn't like it. As opposed, of course to all the prayers given before sessions of the General Assembly that she does like.

Anti-slots group calls governor's gambling plan a "get rich quick" scheme

2012-01-17T21:00:00.000-05:00

For Immediate Release

January 17, 2012

LEXINGTON, KY--The Family Foundation tonight called Gov. Steve Beshear's call to pass gambling in order to solve the state's budget problems a "get rich quick" scheme. The comments came in response to remarks in the Governor's budget address. Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group, asked why it was, in light of the sorry state of the Commonwealth's finances, that Gov. Steve Beshear was spending valuable political capital trying to bring gambling to the state when he should be spending it on trying to fix the state's broken tax system.

"The Governor is acting like some guy who thinks that by spending the family milk money on Lottery tickets, he's going to solve his financial problems," said Cothran. "The Governor needs to drop his get rich quick scheme and work on real solutions to our problems."

Responding to the Governor's appeal tonight to pass gambling legislation, Cothran said, "Instead of rolling up his sleeves and doing the hard work of rethinking our tax system, he wants to roll the dice on an unreliable source of revenue. This is just not responsible fiscal leadership."

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Distributism 101: The two economic fallacies

2012-01-09T07:00:00.002-05:00

Before all the Occupy protesters freeze and lose consciousness, I'd like to point out to them (and anyone else willing to listen) what it is that they should have been protesting about. Instead of taking to the streets and acting like a bunch of spoiled children, they could have been making intelligent criticisms of our economic systems that actually, like, matter.

In this first in a series of posts on the economic theory of Distributism, I want to explain what it is and how it differs from the two extremes in economics: libertarian capitalism and liberal socialism.

Distributism is an economic and social theory that has been gaining a lot of attention for several reasons, I think. The first is a sort of revival in interest in the thought of G. K. Chesterton is recent years. The second is that many of the ideas articulated by Distributists like Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, E. F. Schumacher--as well as the more contemporary Wendell Berry, seem to be underly the thinking of Philip Blond and the Red Tory movement in England.

Distributism is the idea that capital should be spread widely in society--not concentrated in the hands of government and not concentrated in the hands of big business.

The problem with the Occupy protesters is not that they are wrong about a small number of capitalists having too much power: they're problem is that they seem to think that the solution to the problem is a more powerful government. And the problem with the critics of the Occupy movement is, first, that they think there is no economic problem; and, second, that they think the only right kind of economy and society is a libertarian capitalist one.

Our economic discussion, in other words, is cast in a Scylla and Charibdis form: either you are a capitalist and right (or wrong) or you are a socialist and you are wrong (or right). Well, to put it simply: no, not necessarily.

The best simple introduction to distributist economic ideas is Hillaire Belloc's Economics for Helen, a book out of print for many years, but now back in print thanks to IHS Press.

Belloc makes a distinction that could serve as the first lesson for anyone interested in knowing more about Distributism, a distinction that makes sense of so much of the nonsense in the debate over the Occupy movement and its critics: There is economics considered theoretically and economics considered practically--theoretical economics, if you will, and applied economics.

On the one hand, theoretical economics focuses on the way economics laws work. On the other hand, applied economics tell us what the economic state of affairs ought to be. The main problem in economic debates between so-called conservatives (who are really liberals [in the classical sense] on economics) is that they emphasize the theoretical aspect of economics in disregard of the applied, and the problem of the so-called liberals (many of whom are really socialists) emphasize applied economics in disregard of the theoretical.

In regard to the emphasis on theoretical economics, the law of supply and demand and the law of diminishing returns really are all they're cracked up to be. The Law of Comparative Advantage compares very advantageously, and Say's Law does just what Say said. The market, in other words, works in the abstract and in the aggregate. If it were to operate in total freedom without any interference it would produce the most efficient result--in the abstract and in the aggregate.

The trouble is that all the equations and analyses of the increasing mathematical discipline of economics only tells us about those things that are quantifiable. The gross national product may be higher than it's ever been, but that doesn't mean people are happier than they ever were.

To say, as the libertarian capitalists say, that we should just get out of the way and let the market work, is a value judgment, and one that assumes that the kind of abstract, theoretical efficiency that the market produces is the best state of affairs. And often this value judgment of the best state of affairs is spoken of as if it were a judgment that was part of theoretical aspect of economics, when, in fact, it's not.

Economics (in its theoretical sense--applied economics is really a part of politics) is like mathematics: it can tell us how to get to the right amount of whatever it is we want: it cannot tell us what the right amount is. Economics, like math, is completely theoretical in that respect. Economics cannot tell us what is the best allocation of resources: it can only tell us what we should do to get the allocation of resources we already know is, in fact, the best.

The mistake that assumes that the unfettered market automatically produces the best outcome is the typical mistake of capitalists, and it results from the overemphasis on the theoretical aspect of economics.

The second mistake--that made by socialists--is the mistake of thinking that we can merely transfer more power to well-intentioned big government and trust it to do the right thing regardless of the actual quantifiable damage it can do.

The means to success, thinks this school of thought, is to get together, pass policies with nice sounding names (legislation with "children" in the title always works), and simply command that these good things happen. Unfortunately, because of their disregard for the theoretical aspect of economics, there are usually unintended consequences of these actions. Because of the ignorance of laws of theoretical economics, these actions often result in the mitigation of the sought-for good result or the accentuation of some economic evil that was unforeseen.

Great Society programs, intended to help the poor, instead helped foster and sustain an increasingly permanent underclass through a set of bad economic incentives. Minimum wage laws, intended to raise the wages of workers in low paying jobs, often simply resulted in higher unemployment for those seeking entry-level jobs.

The first mistake is utilitarian, since it sees mere quantifiable results as the measure of economic success, and sees quantifiable results as the test of economic success. The second mistake is romantic, and sees good intentions as the test of economic success.

Neither takes real human beings into adequate account.

Abortion politics trumps access to medical care

2012-01-07T12:02:00.000-05:00

Three Kentucky hospitals have moved ahead with a hospital merger, leaving the University of Louisville Hospital in the dust after Gov. Steve Beshear refused to let U of L Hospital join the merger. The new hospital system, called Kentucky One is now the largest network of hospitals in the state.

And U of L Hospital? They're left wondering how they are going to be able to survive at all in a world in which about the only way for a hospital to remain financially sound is to be a part of a larger hospital network.

What is clear from the way things have shaken out is just how committed liberal Democratic politicians like Steve Beshear are to left-wing social groups like the ACLU, The Fairness Campaign, and Planned Parenthood.

The liberals would rather threaten access to medical care for everyone in Louisville than to upset groups whose chief interest is in controlling the population of poor people through "reproductive services."

U of L Hospital is by all accounts in desperate financial straights and is in danger of either going under or having to be bailed out by taxpayers. The Catholic Hospitals didn't need U of L Hospital, but U of L Hospital needed the Catholic Hospital system bad.

Despite the prospect of another leakage of tax dollars in a system of state government that already leaks like a sieve (just check out the retirement system) Beshear tried to put a halt to the proceedings--an action that resulted in the rest of the hospitals, including Louisville's Jewish Hospital, throwing up their hands and shoving off without U of L, which was left standing there surrounded by left-wing protesters cheering for their little political victory that won't cost them a dime, but could cost the taxpayers plenty.

Forget the Governor's protestation about U of L being a "public asset that should not be controlled by the private sector," or that the merger was "not in the best interest of the Commonwealth." This was left-wing abortion politics plain and simple.

The hospital was a private entity which operated in conjunction with U of L, which, until 1970 was a private university and is operated by a private non-profit corporation. Beshear's and Attorney General Jack Conway's basic argument is that, since the hospital gets a lot of state money, it's a state hospital. Well, they'll be giving them a lot more money now just to keep them afloat.

And the groups they kowtowed to that put them in this situation won't be the ones paying for it.

Why Republicans almost always nominate moderates

2012-01-07T11:02:00.000-05:00

It's simple. One fairly well-known moderate runs. About eight conservatives run. The moderate gets all the moderate Republican votes--or the votes of conservatives who don't know how moderate he is--and gets momentum.

Meanwhile the conservatives split the conservative vote, no one of them ever gets enough votes to get enough momentum.

The result: Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain.

Tolkien snubbed by Nobel Committee in 1961, says BBC

2012-01-06T23:39:00.000-05:00

Okay, if you ever wondered what the deal was with the Swedish Academy that decides who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, now we know. According to the BBC News (via the New York Times), J. R. R. Tolkien was snubbed for the award in 1961 after C. S. Lewis nominated him to receive it.

Said the Academy of his work, “the result has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality...”

Uh, yeah. Right.

Instead, the recipient of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature was that household name ... Ivo Andric. You know, the Yugoslav writer and author of the runaway bestseller, Na Drini ćuprija На Дрини ћуприја.

Wouldn't you know, I've searched my library and I just can't lay my hands on my copy.

If only Tolkien had written in Cyrillic script.

The Swedish Academy frowns on American authors, is a little bit more favorable toward Europeans, and has a curious penchant for giving the award to (you guessed it) Swedes. Other writers rejected by the Academy include James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, W. H. Auden, Emile Zola, Robert Frost, E. M. Forster, and Mark Twain.

Jack Abramoff speaks to a KY legislature about the corrupting power of big money

2012-01-05T19:00:00.001-05:00

Although he (or she) is probably getting chewed out right now, whoever it was who invited Jack Abramoff to speak to state legislators at their annual ethics session to begin this legislative session deserves a pat on the back.

Abramoff is the perfect voice for legislators to hear in a session in which the chief issue (once again) is casino gambling. Abramoff went to jail for three and half years in a corruptions scandal that involved lobbyists, congressional aides--and even reached into the White House.

Much of it involved casino money.

Abramoff was convicted in 2,006 for fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy in connection with his lobbying activities on behalf of Indian tribes who paid him over $80 million for lobbying for their interests in Washington. He even bilked the tribes he was working for. He was also indicted in 2005 for his involvement in the purchase of a Florida casino.

His presence in Kentucky is fortuitous, since the gambling industry has given millions in campaign contributions to legislators, many of whom plan on voting for a constitutional amendment to allow casino gambling in the state--and for the present governor who is pressing their cause.

The last big legislative scandal in the state was BOPtrot, another gambling related scandal. Time will tell whether lawmakers listen to Abramoff's warnings about what big money can do to those who set policy for the state.

It makes you wonder...

The Last Free Man in America is Gone: Gatewood Galbraith, RIP

2012-01-04T20:35:00.000-05:00

It was very sad to hear today that Gatewood Galbreath has died. There are some politicians who are greater than the sum of their political parts, and Galbreath was certainly one of these. He was one of the great colorful characters in Kentucky politics and he occupied a unique place in the public consciousness.

Of course, to call him a "politician" is to diminish him. He was a folk hero. He was a perennial statewide candidate, running unsuccessfully for a variety of state offices, something which, for anyone else, would have made him a laughing stock. Instead, it only endeared him the more.

His signature cowboy hat and boots became a familiar sight to those who followed public affairs in Kentucky.

If you talked to the candidates who ran against him or anyone who ever had any dealings with him, the sentiment was the same. Everyone loved Gatewood. Anyone who saw him speak--and he was always the most entertaining speaker on any program--came away saying, "Well, I know he supports legalizing marijuana, but he's smart--and funny."

In fact, someone needs to go around and find out how many people--those you would least expect--secretly voted for Gatewood for Secretary of Agriculture, or Attorney General, or Governor. I'll be the first to step forward.

I did. And I'm proud of it.

Did he have some kooky positions? Sure he did. He was in favor of marijuana legalization, for example. But is that any less kooky than allowing commercials for prescription drugs in a country where prescription drug deaths are legion? He wasn't in favor marijuana legalization for some abstract political reason. He favored it because he saw its advocacy as a strike against the forces of what he called "synthetic subversion," his idea that we have moved from an authentic, agrarian culture to an artificial industrial society. Gatewood Gatewood was a unique amalgam of libertarian and traditionalist, champion of agrarian localism and individual freedom.

Here is an excerpt from his book that gives a taste of the sometimes kooky, but always good humored and largely serious beliefs:

But if you did not know me or what I stand for, and if I only had thirty seconds to get your vote, I would have only one question to ask you.

And if you answer this question one way, I’ve got your vote, no matter what else you think about me.

And if you answer this question the other way, I don’t think you understand the question.

The question is, ‘Did our forefathers’ generation hit the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima so that we would have to pee in a cup to hold a job in America?’

The introduction of the police state methods into American culture is fatal to our freedom. The solutions to our problems lie in the words of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln not Mr. Yamamoto or Helmut Schmidt.

And let’s get this straight. I’m not a racist and I’m not xenophobic. I’m a Nationalist.

I’ll trade with other countries, I’ll have lunch with them and I’ll play golf with them. But until they adopt a Constitution and Bill of Rights that gives their own citizens the rights and freedoms we enjoy, they are not our political peers.

If we abandon our principals of individual freedom and dignity, then our liberty and right to self-determination will abandon us. Our standard of living will fall and our jobs will evaporate as our children and grandchildren are thrown open to competition in the workplace with Four Billion other people on the planet, many of whom will work all day for a bowl of rice and a mat to sleep on.

That is not my vision for Kentucky and its citizens. My vision is rooted in the traditions of our Founding Fathers.

As to the size of government, Thomas Jefferson said, ‘The least government is the best government.’

As to the role of government, Abraham Lincoln said, ‘Prohibition strikes at the very heart of the principles on which this country was founded.’

And as far as having to pee in a cup to hold a job, I look to the words of General George Patton. ‘****** you Nazis!’

I ran into him at one of former Gov. Brereton Jones' August picnics. I walked up and shook his hand and thanked him. I told him he forever won my gratitude for walking out in front of a float lying down in the road at a Fourth of July parade in Lexington that Mayor and former hippy Pam Miller had redesignated to also honor the United Nations. He was carried away to jail to the delight of the crowd.

One of the things I most admired about him is his willingness to go beyond a strict libertarian view of culture. He didn't champion a sterile, contentless freedom. His politics was a human politics, which is perhaps why, in recent years, he changed his pro-abortion position to a pro-life one on the issue of abortion.

Ask around Kentucky, and you will find that liberals, conservatives, and people of every political stripe had a great affection for this man. It's a shame to see him go.

P. J. O'Rourke on popular culture

2012-01-03T12:06:00.001-05:00

P. J. O'Rourke is one of the small handful of writers every one of whose pronouncements I make a point to read. Here is in the Weekly Standard, discussing popular culture:

Now we baby boomers are 50- to 65-year-olds, the age cohort upon which everything always can be blamed. No matter what happens in the world, somebody over 50 wrote the check for it. And how are we doing? Obviously we’ve screwed up love, marriage, the dress code, the economy, politics, and the brief hope, when we were in our forties, that there would be a peaceful, cooperative New World Order (Vladimir Putin, 1952). But popular culture has thrived in our hands.

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it’s the only culture anyone notices. Name a living poet, playwright, novelist, serious composer, artist, or architect who holds the place in public esteem once occupied by Robert Frost, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, Pablo Picasso, or Frank Lloyd Wright.

But also admit we’re well rid of some of the above (all of Miller, most of Mailer, a lot of Bernstein—score for West Side Story excepted—and the decorative influence if not the indecorous output of Picasso). And did highbrow culture really used to be so high? In fact the aesthetic and intellectual atmosphere of 1974 was already stupid. Gerald Ford’s sideburns. Gerald Ford.

Read the rest here.

Courier-Journal favors fairness, except in its news stories

2012-01-02T07:00:00.000-05:00

The Louisville Courier-Journal had has dispensed even with the pretense of fairness in the story of the UofL hospital merger, running an article completely devoted to opponents and not mentioning a single voice critical of the governor's decision to pull the plug on the deal.

Not one.

Ironically, one of the panoply of left-wing groups whose comments were featured in the article which was anything but fair was the "Fairness" Campaign.

Maybe, as the paper continues to shrink and staff continue to be let go, the ombudsman office is just empty now. Not that it ever seemed to matter before.

Rich White Kentucky Liberals Saved: Beshear vetoes hospital merger

2011-12-30T07:00:00.002-05:00

Rich white liberals concerned that population control programs for the poor in Louisville might be cut as a result of University of Louisville Hospital merger with two Catholic hospitals will be popping their champagne corks and dancing all night after Gov. Steve Beshear announced today that he has pulled the plug on the plan.

UofL Hospital and Louisville's Jewish Hospital were slated to come under the control of a Catholic Health Care management group through a merger with Lexington's St. Joseph Hospital and St. Mary's Healthcare, a move that critics worried could mean the end of programs aimed at reducing pregnancies among poor women.

The threatened services to restrict the reproduction of the poor are called "reproductive services."

The opposition to UofL's merger with Catholic hospitals was led by State Reps. Tom Burch and Mary Lou Marzian, both of whom are Catholics. These two Catholics who oppose Catholic teaching on reproduction services that restrict reproduction were undoubtedly delighted by the Governor's action.

Now the critics can munch their caviar in the knowledge that they won't have to look out their limousine windows and see so many poor people running around.

Scientism? What Scientism? We haven't seen any scientism...

2011-12-29T19:00:00.004-05:00

The New Atheists are currently in the throes of denial that their beliefs about religion and philosophy smack of "scientism." And if you can't answer a charge, what better thing to do than to confuse the issue?

The term "scientism" has been around since the late 19th century, but was known as a concept even in ancient times, and it has been applied frequently to the reductive mode of thought that sees all problems as reducible to strictly scientific problems. It's the "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem many atheists have who are blind to their own scientifically unverifiable assumptions as well as the whole range of legitimate beliefs that are immune to scientific testability.

The two main responses of New Atheists like Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse, two scientific bulls who frequently wander into the philosophical china shop, are that a) their beliefs do not meet the criteria of scientism, and b) there are no such things as criteria for scientism anyway. It's kind of hard to hold both these mutually exclusive positions simultaneously, but it is a feat Jerry and Jason attempt in almost every post they write on the subject.

The fact that you can't just take the methodologies and conventions of one body of knowledge and indiscriminately apply them in other intellectual disciplines was understood as early as the 4th century B.C. In Book I, ch. 3 of his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that it is the "mark of an educated man" that not every discipline admits of the same level of precision and that "precision ought not to be sought in the same way in all kinds of discourse."

In other words, you can't verify that, say, Caesar crossed the Rubicon with the same level of precision as you can determine the paternity of a child--and you can't use the same methods to determine the former as the latter--and vice-versa.

To use a technical term: Duh.

It's a simple concept, really, but Coyne and Rosenhouse just doesn't seem to get it. So, first, they feign ignorance. Says Rosenhouse:

But I've never entirely understood what scientism actually is. The usual definition is that scientism is the blinkered belief that science is the only reliable “way of knowing,” but this is vague until we have sharp definitions of “science” and “way of knowing.”

And then there are those pesky terms "the" and "only". What do they mean? Are New Atheist scientists really so philosophically challenged that they can't understand a term that has been around in fairly common discourse in the scholarly community for at least 60 years?

Just pulling down a few random books from my office library shelves, I find very quickly this definition given by John Wellmuth, S.J., in the 1944 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University. "The Nature and Origin of Scientism":

The word "scientism," as used in this lecture, is to be understood as meaning the belief that science, in the modern sense of that term, and the scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford the only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real. (pp. 1-2)

He not only defines it, he describes it and lists its three chief characteristics:

"the fields of the various sciences ... are taken to be coextensive, at least in principle, with the entire field of available knowledge"
"the scientific method ... is the only reliable method of widening and deepening our knowledge and of making that knowledge more accurate"
"either that philosophy should be made scientific by conforming to the methods and ideas of some particular science, or that the function of philosophy is to correlate and if possible unify the findings of the other sciences by means of generalizing on a basis of these findings, after ridding itself of outworn metaphysical notions."

I find basically the same definition in F. A. Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science, where he describes it as:

the mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed ... a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what it he most appropriate way of investigating it. (p. 24)

"Such an attitude," Hayek quotes physicist P. W. Bridgman as saying, "bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy, which might be expected to have exhausted their pragmatic justification at a lower plane of mental activity." (The Logic of Modern Physics, 1928, p. 46).

Then I grab for a third book: Life is a Miracle, by Wendell Berry, who discusses how "this legitimate faith in scientific methodology seems to veer off into a kind of religious faith in the power of science to know all things and solve all problems, whereupon the scientist may become an evangelist and go forth to save the world." (p. 19)

There you have it: a philosopher, an economics, a scientist, and a novelist, poet, and essayist, over a 60 year period, all of whom have no trouble negotiating the term "scientism." But Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse just don't get it.

Maybe it's that narrow scientific training they got. Doesn't seem to transfer over too well into all those other disciplines that are supposed to bend the knee to science, does it?

If there is a problem with this definition, then what is it? There are four basic criteria for a good definition:

that it have both a generic and differentiating element
that the definition and the thing defined be coextensive
that the definition be clearer than what is defined
that the definition be universal (and not individual: you can't define 'Obama', but you can define 'president')

You can find these in ch. 10 of my Material Logic. Wellmuth's definition (and the others) meet all four criteria. So what's the problem? The problem is that the question of what the limits of science are is not a scientific question, but you are arguing with people who think every question is a scientific question, including the question "What is a scientific question?"

The definition of "scientism" is essentially a philosophical endeavor, a kind of question in which Coyne and Rosenhouse have no formal expertise, much less any demonstrated informal facility, and what makes it worse is that they don't seem have a clue that they're insufficient to the task. It's somewhat analogous to a literature professor trying his hand at physics and wondering what all this stuff about time and space really means after all.

To Coyne and Rosenhouse it's all just a religionist plot concocted to cover their own intellectual illegitimacy: "The relevant distinction between scientific knowledge claims and religious knowledge claims is that the former are based on reliable methods while the latter are not." Reliable meaning "scientific." By definition, of course.

The answer? "We should reject totally," says Rosenhouse, "the idea that there are two kinds of knowledge, scientific on the one hand and religious on the other." I would pass this off as merely an attempt by someone trained only in the use of a hammer to redefine everything as a nail, but it is even more strange than that.

Instead of erasing the line between science and religion such that science engulfs religion, instead Coyne and Rosenhouse, in erasing the line between the two, end up only with ... religion. Their religion. The religion of science--or, as we said before, scientism. It is, said Berry, "the religification ... of science." The scientist is no longer the dull gray figure putzing around the lab. No. He must be seen in a more heroic role. The scientist now, says Berry, occupies the "place once occupied by the prophets and priests of religion."

But the argument that Coyne and Rosenhouse think is the most telling argument proving that they are not, in fact, guilty of scientism is the very clever procedure of engaging in it in the very process of denying it.

After arguing that this whole "scientism" thing is just a religionist plot (he would say "creationist" plot except the BioLogos people have been using the term), Rosenhouse waxes scientistic in the very process of denying the existence of scientism:

So I don't think it is unreasonable, in the context of these sorts of discussions, to define science very broadly. It just seems silly to me to say that scientific knowledge is one kind of thing, historical knowledge is something else, philosophical knowledge is a third and mathematical knowledge is a fourth. Mathematicians primarily use deductive reasoning in their work, but deductive reasoning is not some special, mathematical approach to knowledge that is separate from what scientists do. The primary tool of philosophy is dialectical argumentation, but this, too, is not something that is foreign to scientific practice.

In other words, how can there be such a thing as scientism (which is the belief that science is the only legitimate mode of intellectual inquiry) when, in fact, we know that science is the only legitimate mode of intellectual inquiry?

We know that everything is, in fact, a nail because, as you can plainly see, all we've got is there here hammer. QEP (Quod est procusum. Rough translation: "That which was to be ~~proven~~ hammered").

It's nonsense like this that contributes to people Massimo Pigliucci, an atheist scientist who is at least capable of making a competent rational case for his beliefs, charging people like Coyne with "hero worship and a selective dearth of critical thinking."

Hey Baby, He'll Stand His Ground: Cardinal George standing up to the Tolerance Police

2011-12-29T07:00:00.001-05:00

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago isn't standing down from his criticism of the intolerance of gay right groups, which are engaged in their usual attempts to intimidate people who don't agree with their political agenda, an agenda which includes the institutionalized intimidation of people who don't agree with their political agenda.

Part of the trick is to misportray what Cardinal George said, which the media (including the Lexington Herald-Leader in the headline of the story which was origianal from the Chicago Tribune) have portrayed as "Cardinal defends his comparison of gay rights movement to KKK."

What he actually said was that it would not be good if they did become like the KKK, which they promptly proceeded to act like they were becoming after the Cardinal posed the question.

The question involved here is whether gay rights groups themselves, which are constantly accusing groups they disagree with with being hate groups are themselves turning into hate groups, accusing anyone who disagrees with them with being "bigots,"--a devil word in the modern world--simply because they disagree with them.

It's good there is someone who refuses to back down from the intimidation.

Gambling industry already spending big bucks on lobbyists

2011-12-28T19:00:00.000-05:00

I am quoted in the following story today from WDRB-TV in Lousville on the casino gambling industry-funded poll on casino gambling:

Chicago Cardinal under fire for defending pastor against gay rights groups

2011-12-28T07:00:00.001-05:00

The Brown Shorts are at it again. The Chicago Tribune (via the Lexington Herald-Leader) reports that Cardinal Francis George of Chicago is "under fire" for "comparing gay movement with KKK."

The first question is "under fire" by whom? To which the answer is: gay rights groups. So why didn't the paper report that gay rights groups were under fire by the Church? To which the answer is: because the paper--like all newspapers anymore, doesn't even try to be non-partisan in its coverage of issues concerning gay rights. Any criticism of the gay rights movement, which holds itself out as the vanguard of tolerance, is not to be tolerated, a prohibition that is quickly acquiring the force of law.

This incident is only the most recent example of the growing intolerance of the gay rights movement. What the Cardinal actually said was this: "You don't want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism."

And he said it in defense of a pastor who complained that a gay rights march was going to cause his churches to have to cancel its mass.

"Cardinal George's offensive comments are further evidence of just how insensitive and out of touch the hierarchy is," said a spokesman for "Equally Blessed," an allegedly Catholic group that aggitates for "LGBT rights." (It's a strange thing about gay rights groups: the more Catholic they claim to be, the more anti-Catholic they become). The Cardinal's remarks, they said were "crude" and "demagogic."

He wasn't "comparing the gay movement to the KKK," he was saying it would not be good if the gay rights movement took on the anti-Catholic character of groups like the KKK.

According to the Tribune:

Truth Wins Out has launched a Change.org petition that calls for the cardinal's resignation. "It is outrageous that Cardinal George would place law-abiding, peaceful citizens in the same category as a notoriously violent hate group," Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen said to Change.org. "George's resignation is his only road to redemption, and if he has a shred of dignity and a sliver of class, he will immediately step down."

Historically, the KKK engaged in systematic misrepresentation of those it disagreed with. It also engaged in political intimidation of its detractors. So responses like this to Cardinal George are about as comforting as if they were to don pink hoods--or burn the double spear and shield on church lawns.

If gay rights groups really want to discourage any comparison to hate groups, then they should stop acting like them.

The gambling industry's push poll

2011-12-27T12:00:00.000-05:00

For Immediate Release
December 27, 2011
Contact: Martin Cothran

LEXINGTON, KY—A family advocacy group, which has been opposed to expanded gambling in Kentucky, raised questions today about a new survey that purports to show majority support for a constitutional amendment to legalize casino-style gambling in Kentucky. "This survey was bankrolled by the gambling industry," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation. "It showed what they wanted it to show.”

"We should place about as much credence in a poll finding support for gambling funded by the gambling industry as we would place in a study on the health risks of tobacco funded by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company."

The group also pointed out that the questions asked were ones people would answer the same way no matter what the issue was. "Any time you ask people whether they want to vote on something, they'll say 'Yes'. People always want to have their say, no matter what the issue is. But putting it this way misrepresents the constitutional amendment process in this state and misportrays it as a ballot initiative process, which it isn't. For all practical purposes, this is a push poll."

One of the questions promised increased funding for a number of popular programs if the amendment were passed, promises the group said were unrealistic. "One of the questions basically promised increased funding for education, health care, public safety, and local government, said Cothran. "These promises not only bias the survey, but they are things that will not be put in a constitutional amendment. It will be like the Lottery promises on education funding--promises that went unfilled for over ten years, but which snookered people in to voting for it anyway." Cothran wondered what the response would have been had other questions been asked. "What would the response have been had they asked questions like ‘Do you think Kentucky should write into its constitution a full or partial monopoly for casino-style gambling to horse tracks that are owned by millionaires?’"

The group called for the public release of all the questions on the survey, and the order in which they were asked, all of which are factors that bear on results.

###

Trailer for The Hobbit

2011-12-27T07:00:00.001-05:00

New "Classical Teacher" magazine is here

2011-12-26T19:00:00.006-05:00

On a newstand near you--or just click here.

The new Classical Teacher magazine, of which I am managing editor, is now out, which includes articles such as:

"Why Use the King James Bible?" by Martin Cothran
"The Top Ten Reasons for Studying Latin", by Cheryl Lowe
"The Noblest Monument of English Prose," by Cheryl Lowe and Martin Cothran
"A Whale of a Distinction," [on the logical difference between humans and animals], by Martin Cothran
FEATURE ARTICLE: "What the King James Bible Hath Wrought," by Martin Cothran
"Greek to You: Is classical education really dead?" An interview with Tracy Lee Simmons

For a free subscription, go here.

Literature and the Bible

2011-12-26T07:00:00.000-05:00

One of the things that strike you when you delve into English literature is the extent of the influence of the Bible, a place great writers find hard not to go to when looking for ways to reach the soul. Here is Marilyn Robinson, writing primarily about William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and secondarily about Fyodor Dostoyevski's The Idiot--two of the great portrayals of Christ figures in literature--in the New York Times:

Each of these works reflects a profound knowledge of Scripture and tradition on the part of the writer, the kind of knowledge found only among those who take them seriously enough to probe the deepest questions in their terms. These texts are not allegories, because in each case the writer has posed a problem within a universe of thought that is fully open to his questioning once its terms are granted. Here the use of biblical allusion is not symbolism or metaphor, which are both rhetorical techniques for enriching a narrative whose primary interest does not rest with the larger resonances of the Bible. In fact these great texts resemble Socratic dialogues in that each venture presupposes that meaning can indeed be addressed within the constraints of the form and in its language, while the meaning to be discovered through this argument cannot be presupposed. Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty.

Read the rest here.

The Darwinists get it wrong again: Letter from KY superintendent continues to spawn nonsense

2011-12-20T07:00:00.002-05:00

Matt Young at Panda's Thumb, a Darwinist blog, describes my post on the correspondence between the Kentucky superintendent and State Education Commissioner in the comments section of his post on the issue. According to Young, I defend Mr. Line and demonstrate "just enough erudition to hide the anti-scientific tenor of the post. If you haven’t enough time or patience, I suggest you scroll directly down to the comment by Scott Goodman, who really hits the nail on the head."

And this:

At any rate, the author of the blog ran a post that defends Mr. Line and demonstrates just enough erudition to hide the anti-scientific tenor of the post. If you haven’t enough time or patience, I suggest you scroll directly down to the comment by Scott Goodman, who really hits the nail on the head.

Hmmm. Apparently pointing out inaccuracies, oversimplifications, and misleading statements is unscientific in the world of scientific dogmatism. That can't do a whole lot for the reputation of the science about which Young seems so concerned.

And speaking of scientific dogmatism, which is what I was targeting in my post, Young doesn't seem to want to make the basic distinction between criticisms of such dogmatism (what I do in the post) and criticisms of actual science (which I don't do in the post), which, of course, is exactly the kind of distinction scientific dogmatists don't like to make.

And to commend for his readership a comment in the comments section of my blog which itself stretches the truth is another measure of extent to which standards of intellectual integrity are regularly dispensed with when it comes to the defense of certain scientific dogmas.

The comment inaccurately refers to me as a defender of Intelligent Design, blatantly mischaracterizes my arguments, and criticizes me for statements I did not make. Not that I expect this to make any difference to Young, since these are rhetorical tactics regularly employed at places like Panda's Thumb.

So far, neither Young nor the commenters on my blog even bothered to address the actual arguments I made in the post (with one exception, and this one got it wrong--as he usually does). I fact, no one as yet come to terms with the arguments I made in my original analysis of the Kitzmiller decision's reasoning in uncritically employing a faulty demarcation criterion between science and non-science and in a blatant inconsistency at the center of that part of the decision.

Instead, we get cheap ad hominem attacks like the comment from Young that I am "the Discovery Institute’s point man in Kentucky." Huh?

How does he know this? He heard it from "his informant." Never mind actually checking it out or verifying whether it was true. Mere random Internet rumor will suffice. One hopes he takes more care in the books he writes about evolution.

My only connection with Discovery is that they have co-posted some of my blog posts that have to do with criticisms of scientific dogmatism. I do not take a position on whether Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory, as the commenter he refers to alleges. Never have. Nor have I ever done or been asked to do anything for Discovery in Kentucky.

But no misrepresentation is so far out that it cannot be justified by the fact that it is done in the defense of Darwinism.

Louisville metro government action threatens medical service to poor

2011-12-19T19:00:00.011-05:00

This is several days old, but it hasn't gotten any less ridiculous after seven days:

Louisville Metro Government is delaying an $803,000 payment to University Hospital to fund medical care for poor people this month because of some council members’ concerns over the hospital’s proposed merger.

Hospital spokesman David McArthur said he could not say Monday night if care for the poor would be affected without the money.

The chief concern expressed about the merger is that some poor people won't get "reproductive services" (a term which, we have pointed out, means "anti-reproductive services"). So now Metro government, in order to try to ensure that some poor people are not denied services, are, by withholding their money, threatening to deny poor people services.

You gotta hand it to these people. They are creative.

KY school official's letter to superintendent only partially evolved

2011-12-19T07:00:00.093-05:00

Just when the public education establishment thought it had stamped out all dissent in its ranks on the issue of evolution, low and behold it now finds a rogue male that has somehow separated from the herd.

Here's the Lexington Herald-Leader, reporting on this crisis:

A Western Kentucky school superintendent is arguing that a new test which Kentucky high school students will take for the first time next spring will treat evolution as fact, not theory, and will require schools to teach that way.

The letter, written by Hart County School Superintendent Ricky D. Line, has sparked an animated demonstration among the chattering classes here in the state--and has caused a number of skeptic and atheist bloggers to leave off grooming themselves long enough to cast the usual aspersions in the general direction of anybody who strays away from the tribe.

The letter prompted a response by officials on the highest branch of the education tree: State Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday and the Kentucky School Board. At first blush, the letter sounds pretty impressive. But after running it through our usual battery of observational procedures here at Vital Remnants, it becomes clear that a number of things don't add up.

The letter is signed by the Commissioner but, by his own admission, he relies on research provided by the Department of Education's "legal and curriculum staffs." Now I can't say too much bad about the lawyers at KDE: They, at least, got real actual academic degrees. But "curriculum staff"? Are these people with "education degrees"? As we have pointed out here before, you can get better academic credentials by mailing in a coupon from a cereal box.

The letter gives the superintendent a lecture on the use of the word "theory." Line had asserted that evolution was "just a theory." Holliday says that, in science, the word "theory" does not mean, as it does in common usage, "little more than a guess." Holliday takes him to task for using the term in its everyday use rather than its use among the higher species of hominids known as "scientists."

Apparently Holliday and the Board didn't notice that Line was not making a scientific statement, but speaking in common English, in which the common usage of the word was exactly as Line was using it. Line was not engaging in science when he wrote the letter: He was speaking in common everyday English to the State Commissioner of Education. But, of course, educrats have trouble with common English and strongly prefer jargon to plain speech.

"Theory" as Holliday defines it, is a scientific jargon word, with a different meaning inside the discipline, one which is surely quite useful there. But which, outside it, only offers education bureaucrats an opportunity to make pedantic points that have no real relevance to the discussion.

Lectures like this (which you hear every time you use the word "theory" in its vernacular sense in the presence of a Darwinist ideologue) are turned into an opportunity to enforce a dominance hierarchy in which those who dissent from the Approved opinions are kept in their proper place in the cultural pecking order by implying that those who disagree with the dominant paradigm are just not very smart. Either that or they just can't make a basic distinction between common vernacular speech and the technical vocabulary of an academic discipline, which, in itself is not very smart.

Secondly, in the process of giving this lecture, Holliday says:

In science, facts never become theories. Rather, theories explain facts. [emphasis in original]

That is, at best, an oversimplification. All you've got to do is to and talk to a quantum physicist, who (if he adheres to the Copenhagen interpretation, the original and still standard interpretation of the theory) will tell you that science is not in the business of explanation, but of prediction. Quantum theory, the most successful predictive paradigm in science, has, for all practical purposes, handed explanation back to the philosophers. Niels Bohr. Check it out.

Then there's this gem:

Additionally, science is not a system of belief. To ask if a scientist ‘believes’ in the theory of evolution is an improper question because the term ‘belief’ implies a position or opinion based on faith. A biologist would properly say he/she understands and acknowledges the evidence supporting the theory of evolution. Belief is an act of faith and is not necessarily concerned with the availability of supporting evidence. For this reason, beliefs are not considered to be within the realm of science.

Just go ask a real scientist if he "believes" in the theory of evolution. You know what will happen? In all likelihood, he'll say, "Yes." He won't give you some geekish lecture on the proper way to phrase the question in a scientific environment.

Fortunately the ignorance that prevails in the higher branches of the public education tree has not yet infected lexicography. Here are a few definitions of "belief" culled from standard dictionaries:

American Heritage: "Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons"
Merriam-Webster: " conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence."
Webster's New World Dictionary: "A belief is an opinion or something that a person holds to be true."

Not only does this not comport with what you will find in almost any standard dictionary, it doesn't comport with the terminology commonly used in academics disciplines like philosophy, a discipline that does things like, you know, define.

And even if it were true that the term "belief" only referred to opinions based on faith, scientists don't talk like this. They commonly talk about "believing" that the theory of evolution (or replace this with any other scientific theory). So if scientists themselves talk this way, why are we giving pedantic lectures to school superintendents?

This is all nonsense. Under the most universal use of these terms science is belief based on reason and evidence and faith is belief based on divine revelation or authority. These terms are used this way all the time by people in and outside the discipline of science.

The irony here is that most people believe in evolution on the same basis they believe in religious faith positions: on the basis of authority. They don't have the least conception of what the scientific evidence for it is; they simply believe it on the grounds that the scientists they've heard about say it's true. The further irony is that many scientists, who claim to be all about reason and evidence, not only think there is nothing wrong with all the people who believe in Darwinism on the basis of scientific authority, but think it would be unscientific not to!

Besides, science proceeds as much by scientists' faith in their own hunches and intuitions as by reason and evidence, as anyone familiar with Einstein--or for that matter Galileo (whose heliocentrism was not supported by the evidence of the time, as the Church rightly pointed out)--would know.

Finally, Holliday tries his hand at the law, with the help, apparently, of his legal department:

Moreover, the federal courts have ruled that creation science, a religious concept or belief, is not science at all. [See Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F.Supp.2d 707, 764 (E.D.Pa. 2005); McLean v. Ark. Bd. of Educ., 529 F.Supp. 1255, 1259 (E.D.Ark.1982) (dismissing “creation science” as “simply not a science”).]

It may be true or false that creation science is not science. But to appeal to a court decision--and a problematic one at that, is slightly strange. Courts may have the power to dictate what schools can and can't teach, but to appeal to them as the final arbiters of the definition of science is highly problematic to say the least. Philosophers of science can't even agree on where to draw the line between science and non-science. So how is a judge supposed to competently do it?

In fact, the reasoning in the Kitzmiller decision, at some points, inconsistent, and, at others, simply laughable. I wrote a response to the section on the ruling in which the scientific status of ID is discussed here.

Judge John Jones first simply assumes Karl Popper's demarcation criterion--that a necessary condition for something to be science is that it be potentially falsifiable. But Popper's demarcation criterion has long been considered problematic in the philosophy of science, since it excludes activities commonly acknowledge to be science. Anyone blindly applying it as Jones does has no business making authoritative pronouncements about what makes science different from non-science.

Jones argues that Intelligent Design does not meet this criterion because it is not falsifiable. He then turns right around and argues that it is false. If it's not false, then it is falsifiable, and if it is not falsifiable, then it cannot be false. But he just goes on hoping that no one will notice the blatant contradiction in his argument.

Such is the state of the Commissioner of Education's arguments. But remember: it's superintendent Line who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Sheez.

The Adultery Gap: Why Francis Beckwith should vote for Newt, Part III

2011-12-15T19:00:00.007-05:00

In my continuing (but not necessarily successful) attempt to convince my friend Frank Beckwith that the arguments against Newt Gingrich just don't hold up, I have discussed the arguments against Gingrich of Russ Douthat and Rod Dreher that Frank had mentioned in his original post. I now come to Frank's own arguments.

After discussing Gingrich's three marriages (and subsequent conversion) and the "significant House ethics violation" when he was House Speaker in the 1990s, Frank agrees with Rod Dreher that

Christian conservatives, in the toxic atmosphere of the culture wars, cannot afford to have as a public face a figure who for most of his adult life has shunned the virtues and ways of life that Christian conservatives want to advance in the public square.

and then adds:

This is not to diminish or call into question Gingrich’s conversion. Quite the opposite. For, as the Catholic Catechism teaches, absolution of sins does not eradicate all the effects and consequences of those sins on the shaping of one’s character. This requires ongoing conversion, including detaching oneself from those things that may provide an occasion for sin.

It seems to me that a man whose sins arose as a consequence of the pursuit of political power and the unwise use of it after he became Speaker of the House should not be seeking the most powerful office in the world.

Well let's talk about the ethics violation first. There were 75 charges brought against Gingrich by Democratic House whip David Bonior.

All but one of them was found to be without merit. The one that remained involved an allegedly partisan college class (despite the fact that the words "Democrat" and "Republican" never were used in the lectures and one entire lecture was devoted to praising FDR) he was accused of having funded through tax deductible contributions from nonprofit corporations and lying about where the contributions came from.

These were classes that one former IRS commissioner said were not in violation of IRS rules and to which a member of the ethics committee had given prior approval. And Newt was never even paid for the course. Despite all this, it was ruled an ethics violation.

In regard to the charge of lying, Gingrich had made several filings with the committee, all of which divulged that the money for the courses came from the group "Renewing American Civilization"--except for one, which stated the opposite. It was fairly clear from all the filings that he wasn't trying to hide the fact, but the committee was able to justify its charge by pointing to the one filing, which in all likelihood was made by mistake.

He was charged with an ethics violation. Fair enough. But I'm not sure it could be characterized as a "significant House ethics violation."

This was the same ethics committee that, after all, which after censuring Newt and slapping him with a $300,000 fine then gave Congressman Barney Frank a slap on the wrist for fixing 30 parking tickets and providing a misleading probation letter on behalf of his live-in gay lover who moonlighted as a drug dealer and child pornographer.

The marriage issue seems to me to be the most telling of all the charges Beckwith discusses in his article. But here too, a double standard is being applied.

To say, as Frank does, that a person's sins prior to his conversion will still have consequences afterward is true. Of course they will. But it isn't our prerogative to exact them. The Biblical examples, such as that of David, do indeed demonstrate that sin has consequences, but it nowhere indicates that these consequences are enforced by men.

In fact, the example of David is material here for a number of reasons. Here you have a man whose sins we could certainly say were at least facilitated by the power he enjoyed. And yet God himself does not take his power away. Maybe it's because God saw his heart after his repentance--something that we, of course, have no power to see.

We could multiply examples. If we are going to say we should hold the sins which men commit before their conversion against them, then Gingrich isn't the only one we should be holding them against.

Several Watergate co-conspiritors later became Christians (thought not Catholics) and entered the ministry. These were men who committed, not ethics violations, but crimes that sent them to prison. One of them was Chuck Colson. Did we or should we have applied this standard to them? Someone could respond that these men were not contending for their old positions of political power, but new positions of religious responsibility, but why shouldn't the same standard apply? In fact, shouldn't the bar be higher in the ministry than in the secular world?

The same could be said of St. Augustine himself, who occupied the most powerful academic position in the greatest empire the world has ever known, and professed to have been quite the scamp in his earlier life. And if you consider his journeys through several systems of false belief, you might also say that his intellectual sins were as scarlet. Should he have been disqualified from the position as Bishop of Hippo?

This is not to say that Gingrich is any Augustine--or that character doesn't matter. But what I think it does say is that conversion matters and that the consequences of the sins that preceded it will and should happen with no help from the rest of us. In fact, the consequences of Newt's sins are even now being exacted in the form of the light that is being shone on them and the criticism he is taking.

Clearly, Frank's motivation is a concern for Gingrich himself. He thinks he ought not be put in a position in which the temptations he succumbed to before his conversion could accost him again. I have nothing but respect for that. But I cannot help but believe that the public scrutiny a president's life receives while he is in office makes such things, not more, but less likely.

Do we really think Gingrich would be more likely to commit adultery as president? I think that if we think about it for a moment we would probably conclude otherwise. Yes, it didn't stop Clinton, but by all accounts Clinton (who was not only not contrite about his personal moral lapses, but committed perjury to conceal them) was something of a sexual predator. No one I know has made that charge of Gingrich.

It is not that I think there is not a good case against Newt. But I think that it is his promiscuity in regard to ideas that may be a greater weakness. He flirts with them. He teases them. And sometimes he dumps them after a one night stand. It's an occupational hazard with intellectuals.

Still, there is something unconvincing about the charge that a man can't be president because he is too smart.

Gingrich is a conservative--and the arguments saying he isn't, made against a man who organized a conservative revolution that resulted in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and who had a consistently conservative voting record throughout his career, seem to me to be ludicrous.

Furthermore, we know one thing about him: He will not only win every debate he has with Obama but he would be the most aggressive and articulate person to head the ticket.

I've spent much more time refuting the charges against Newt than in stating the positive case for him, but I think I'll just leave it at that for now.

This and the two previous posts originated with Frank Beckwith's mention of our conversations years ago at a little coffee shop in Anaheim, California, when I once recommended he read a book by Gingrich. My only regret is that I cannot flag down a waitress and ask her to pour me another cup so I could continue the conversation with an old friend who I respect and admire.

Against Political Gnosticism: Why Francis Beckwith should vote for Newt Gingrich, Part II:

2011-12-13T19:00:00.000-05:00

In yesterday’s post, I discussed, as part of my campaign to convince my friend Francis Beckwith to vote for Newt Gingrich, I discussed New York Times columnist Russ Douthat’s mistaken assumption that the Republican nominee for president doubles, by virtue of his nominee status, as the “standard bearer” for conservative Christianity—a belief, I argued, that no conservative Christian could reasonably accept.

I hold that no conservative Christian should enter the voting booth under the mistaken impression that he is voting for the “standard bearer” of his faith. His faith should inform his voting, but his voting is not an act of faith. Any act should be judged on the basis of whether it achieves its purpose. The purpose of voting is to elect a person who would best discharge the duties of the office he is running for. Now the duties of the office of president admittedly preclude dishonoring the office with moral scandal, and so the character issue is not irrelevant. But I will discuss that in my last post.

Today I deal with Rod Dreher, whose thoughts on this issue Frank also mentioned in his explanation of why he was not voting for Gingrich. Now I happen to share many beliefs with Dreher, who is famous for his championing of “crunchy conservatism”—the idea that conservatism consists not only of a belief in the efficacy of free markets and anti-communism, but that, as a matter of practical living, small is beautiful, the natural is better than the artificial, that real community is local, etc. To all that I say, "Amen." But I think Dreher has got the Gingrich thing all wrong.

Dreher begins his argument by discussing Douthat:

He points out that conservative Christianity is facing a big demographic challenge in this country. Younger American Christians are much less engaged by the same culture-war fights that have preoccupied their parents’ generation of Christians. As Robert Putnam and others have documented in social science research, many of the Millenials have turned from Christianity itself, or from conservative Christianity, out of dissent from the “Republican Party At Prayer” model of Christianity they discern there. Gingrich is a classic example the kind of thing that younger Christians (and ex-Christians) find so objectionable about the Religious Right, Ross points out, in that he is an icon of partisan piety that looks an awful lot like rank hypocrisy.

The more I consider Douthat’s arguments on these issues the more I think he is the conservative equivalent of Screwtape. There are two assertions here, the first is utilitarian through and through, and the second assumes a blatant falsehood. The first is that candidates should refrain from promoting conservative cultural ideals in order to be more electable. I can’t believe how easily this assumption is stomached by conservatives like Dreher. Does Dreher really buy into this?

Are they demanding that conservatives downplay their conservatism in order to win elections? I thought that was the liberal media's job. And what kind of conservative cheers them on for doing this?

And where are Douthat and Dreher getting the idea that Gingrich comes off as some kind of fiery-eyed religious cultural warrior? If anything, Newt’s problem is that he sounds like an overly-professorial policy wonk.

Dreher also accepts hook, line, and sinker Douthat’s argument that Newt, despite his Catholic conversion--and because he is no saint, he’s not qualified:

St. Paul was a persecutor of Christians, and look what he became. Okay, but is Newt St. Paul? St. Paul’s conversion, and later life, did not serve for his worldly glorification and entree to power. In fact, it landed him in prison, put his life in jeopardy, and, according to tradition, ultimately led to his martyrdom. Newt’s conversion has not borne similar fruits.

Okay, I’m just not getting this. Newt can't be the Republican nominee because he isn't as holy as St. Paul?

I noted yesterday that the criteria Douthat employs for a candidate for public office cannot possibly be met by any but a few stray candidates who could never win anyway. Now Dreher enters the fray, proposing, not just sainthood, but martyrdom as a necessary condition for the Republican nominee for president.

Now there's a qualification that narrows the field.

I’ve said it before, folks: if you’re looking for saints, you need to go somewhere else besides politics. If you are restricted to voting only for saints and martyrs, you might as well just stay home because there wouldn't be anyone to vote for anyway. It's one thing to say that character matters; it's another to say that a candidate must have a spotless background.

Look, Newt has some major league baggage, no question. But I'm trying to figure out why, if you're trying to establish a threshold over which Newt can't jump, you would set the bar so high that no candidate can make it over.

What Dreher and Douthat are articulating is a sort of political Gnosticism whereby the Christian voter is to see his practical act of voting, an act inherently plagued by imperfection and lack of clarity, as an act akin to the selection of a pope.

To my knowledge, Douthat and Dreher have not announced their own favorites for the Republican nomination. I guess we'll know when, from their chimneys, we see white smoke, and from their mouths hear the words, "Habemus praesidem."

I'll address Frank's post itself on Thursday.

Why Francis Beckwith should vote for Newt Gingrich, Part I

2011-12-12T07:00:00.003-05:00

My friend Frank Beckwith has explained, in a post at The Catholic Thing, why he is not going to vote for Newt Gingrich. Since I was mentioned in the piece as the one who originally familiarized him with Gringich--in a book recommendation over coffee some 27 years ago, I have claimed some standing in his decision-making process. I have said that I will attempt to convince him (as I had the power to do on other issues in a little coffee shop in Anaheim, California almost three decades ago) to vote for Gingrich--even in the face of his threat, made in an e-mail to me last Friday, to turn me "into a newt."

I have no doubt, given the prowess he has shown in his every other endeavor, that he could accomplish this. But while he's figuring out the proper spell for bringing this transformation about, I hope, in a preemptive rhetorical strike, to turn him into a Newt supporter.

Frank has expressed his admiration for the arguments against supporting Gingrich of Russ Douthat and Rod Dreher, arguments I propose to show are not only weak, but profoundly and fundamentally flawed. I propose also to show that the arguments in favor of supporting Newt for conservative Christians are compelling.

But we are dealing with three things here, which will have to be dealt with in three separate posts. The first is Douthat, the second Dreher, and the third, Beckwith.

So, first, let's analyze the arguments of Douthat that Dreher and Frank have incorporated into their posts by reference.

The case of Douthat against Gingrich is marred by a fundamentally mistaken assumption about Christians and politics, and his article completely mistates the nature of the issue of whether Christians should support Gingrich in his quest for the Republican nomination. His case is further plagued by the fact that taking his suggestions would effectively neuter any Christian influence in secular politics.

What is the relation between Christianity and politics?
Douthat begins his piece by stating that "religious conservatives have good reasons to be wary of Newt Gingrich." Well, yes. But the problem is that the statement is so general as to be meaningless. What candidate for president should we not be wary of? And the further problem is that it is all downhill from there.

Douthat states the issue thus: "The real issue for religious conservatives isn’t whether they can trust Gingrich. It’s whether they can afford to be associated with him." What he means by "being associated" with Gingrich is made clear later in the piece, where he discusses Gingrich being "anointed as the standard bearer for the very cause that he betrayed."

What cause is this? What is it that Douthat thinks Gingrich is contending for and that we should be deciding to confer on him? A standard bearer for what? Here is the key statement in Douthat's piece--the one on which his whole case hinges:

In a climate of culture war, any spokesman for conservative Christianity is destined to be a polarizing figure. (Just ask Tim Tebow.) But a religious right that rallied around Gingrich would be putting the worst possible face on its cause and at the worst possible time.

The cause Douthat thinks Gingrich is contending for is the very representation of conservative Christianity itself.

Say what? Since when did Christians conservatives consider the Republican nominee the representative of conservative Christianity (or any other kind of Christianity, for that matter)?

For Douthat to say that, in voting for a Republican nominee for president, we are in fact choosing the official representative of conservative Christianity is to fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between Christianity and politics. It is to assume that one political party is--or could be--the "standard bearer" for the Faith.

But this is a belief to which no conservative could consent. In fact, I think it would be hard to find one who actually did. In fact, I don't think Douthat would consent to it if it were presented in its literal form. This is ironic, given Douthat's argument, which is that Gingrich would embarrass Christians--those whose standard, under Douthat's thinking, he would be bearing. In articulating the argument and doing it as some sort of representative of conservative Christianity, he has not exactly done his constituents proud. But then, Douthat did not get his post as de facto spokesperson for Christians at the New York Times on the basis of anyone voting for him, now did he?

No politician should ever be seen as the "standard bearer" for Christianity, conservative or otherwise.

Once this, the lynchpin of Douthat's argument, is taken away, the wheels simply fall of the rest of his case. Once we come to a sober realization that we are not electing the standard bearer for conservative Christianity on the basis of his adherence to its principles and practices, but rather selecting a man or woman to be president of the United States on the basis of his ability to do that particular job well, the issue changes its character altogether.

In fact, the great irony of the assumption Douthat employs in his piece is that it is an assumption only a liberal could make. Liberals are defined in part on the basis of their belief that one can find his salvation in politics. It is liberals who, to use the words of Eric Voegelin, "immanentize the eschaton." That Douthat would have imported this assumption into his argument is a measure of the extent to which some evangelicals see themselves as captives to the Republican Party.

They need to divest themselves of this assumption.

Now Douthat could argue that, in fact, people will see Gingrich this way if he is nominated. Yes, they might. But that would happen not because of anything Gingrich might do, but because people like Douthat were using their own perceived positions as representatives for conservative Christianity to promote the false idea that anyone, by virtue of being supported by evangelicals for the Republican nomination, represented their cause.

Newt Gingrich is running for the Republican presidential nomination, not the "standard-bearer" for conservative Christianity.

While Douthat's assumption involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between politics and religion that has the effect of tying the two too closely together, the other and more practical effect of his argument is to render Christian influence on secular politics almost impossible.

If someone who claims to be a conservative Christian becomes, by virtue of being the Republican presidential nominee, the "standard bearer" of conservative Christianity, then, practically speaking, no one, under Douthat's assumption, could ever qualify. Anyone occupying such a position would embarrass the conservative Christian cause to some extent.

In fact, if one looks at the current choices available in the Republican stable of candidates, is there even a one who would not embarrass the Faith? Michelle Bachmann, who has a disturbing tendency to overstate the case for some of her beliefs? Rick Santorum, who has all the gravitas of an enthusiastic puppy? Ron Paul, who already--whether it's deserved or not--has a reputation as something of a kook? Or maybe Rick Perry--who has played the religion card to a more pronounced degree than all the others--who rhetorically implodes on a somewhat regular daily schedule?

Many of these other candidates have a much less checkered background when it comes to sexual immorality, but sexual immorality is hardly the only behavior that would induce embarrassment among the faithful. Douthat has at once placed Christianity too close to politics and yet pushed Christians themselves too far from it. It would be hard for a liberal columnist at the New York Times to achieve as much.

Well, let's see, who else is there? Ah: Mitt Romney. By all accounts Mitt Romney is, morally and intellectually speaking, as upright and competent as they come. But he's a Mormon. But he would, in Douthat's religio-political framework, be the "standard bearer" for Mormonism. In that case, we would have, not a conservative Christian bringing shame upon conservative Christianity, but a Mormon bringing honor on Mormonism. For as by one man's disobedience many conservative Christians might be embarrassed, so by the obedience of one might many Mormons be made proud.

And then there is the more straightforward problem that if Romney wins the Republican nomination with evangelical support, we would have a Mormon being the "standard bearer" for conservative Christianity.

It is a strange irony that by the very assumption employed in Douthat's argument against voting for Gingrich for the Republican nomination, a conservative Christian would be prohibited from voting for Romney as well. Well, that certainly narrows the field of legitimate Republican contenders, doesn't it?

We'll take up Dreher tomorrow, but in the meantime, to Frank Beckwith, I say this: Let me tie you to the mast, my friend! Don't harken to the political song of this Siren!

To vote or not to vote--for Gingrich

2011-12-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

Christian philosopher Francis Beckwith has a post today at the Catholic Thing in which he recounts one of our many evening conversations over coffee when we were in grad school. As he recounts it, in an attempt to convert him over to the conservative cause, I had recommended that he read Newt Gingrich's book Window of Opportunity: Blueprint for the Future.

This is the Francis Beckwith who rocked the theological world by converting to Catholicism while he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is now in the philosophy dept. at Baylor University.

I honestly don't remember having done this, but I'm going to trust him on it because the sands of time have worn away much of my memory of that time when Frank and I used to meet at JoJo's after class.

Unlike most people I recommend books to, Frank actually read the ones I recommended to him, which is one of the reasons that I now claim credit for all of his incredible successes in world of academic philosophy. Hey, it's a lot easier claim credit for Frank's successes than it is to have achieved them myself.

In any case, he recounts the impact the book had on his political thought. But the post has a surprise ending: he says he is not going to vote for Gingrich.

So I have decided to pay him the biggest compliment I know how to give: I am going to argue with him. Maybe, just maybe, I can call up the old magic and influence him again. I intend to post it on Monday, and to call it, "Why Francis Beckwith should vote for Newt Gingrich."

My goal is to one day be tottering around the Old Bloggers Rest Home (which I hope will be in the same complex as the Old Philosophers Home) with a walker and to run into Frank, who, tottering around with a walker himself, will, as he recalls the old days, reminisce about the time I succeeded in convincing him to vote for Gingrich.

Stay tuned.

Newt Gingrich: The One

2011-12-08T23:00:00.001-05:00

This is really terrible. I have just found out about another scandal involving Newt Gingrich: he has an ego. I found out about this by watching the analysis on television and places like the Huffington Post about the presidential election.

According to these reports, he thinks he's pretty big stuff. I have never heard of a politician having a big ego before. How could he possibly have gotten this far with this being noticed?

The next thing you know, they'll be calling him "The One" and acting like a political messiah and the media will fawn all over him and get so starry-eyed that they won't notice that he has an ego at all and just report good things about him on not report anything bad.

I don't know how we could have missed this.

My plan for improving Jefferson County Public Schools

2011-12-08T19:00:00.003-05:00

The mostly lily white Jefferson County School Board, having been slapped down by courts for their forced busing plans to impose racial quotas in their schools, is now spending more valuable time and resources trying cook up a plan to put kids on buses for long periods of time so that, while it will take valuable time away from things like, you know, studying, they can feel all diverse and tolerant and socially conscious.

I don't know though, there are a lot of white faces on that board. Can't they bus in some people of color so that they could at little more diverse so that when they preach diversity to other people they could actually be diverse themselves?

In any case, I am now releasing my plane for Jefferson County Public Schools that I think might solve some of their problems--like the problem of schools that are really bad. You can see it to the right. It has the advantage of a) being cheaper than having an entire bureaucracy trying to devise a Byzantine busing plan that does nothing but waste people's time, and b) it would actually improve things by (and this will sound revolutionary and might possibly not make any sense to JCPS) actually improving learning.

Headline of the Week: "Chaplains wanted for atheists in foxholes"

2011-12-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

Atheists now want their own chaplains in the military. But remember, atheism is not a religion. Keep repeating it. Over and over again.

Check it out here.

Is the ban on homosexuals giving blood a public health issue or a civil rights issue?

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

Jon Rohner is gay, according to the Sunday Louisville Courier-Journal, and he wants to give blood, but he can't because there is a ban on homosexual men giving blood because of all the diseases they contract through indiscriminate sex with each other. But it doesn't matter because it makes him cry.

Yes, homosexuals are 60 times more likely to have HIV, and they have a sometimes drastically higher rate of other diseases like Hepatitis (both A and B), MRSA, Proctitis, Shegellosis, as well as all the other convention STDs like Gonorrhea and Syphilis and a whole bunch of other diseases that we can't pronounce and a handful that they invented themselves and that's why federal health officials don't want them giving blood. But does this justify making gays like Rohner feel bad?

Isn't it wrong to prevent one group of people from giving blood just because they have all kinds of exotic diseases and will infect the blood supply?

It's bigotry. That's what it is. It's just another excuse to hate the gays.

I mean what do people think this is? A public health issue? Don't they realize that, like every other issue having to do with gays, this is a political issue?

And don't they realize that it doesn't matter whether it's science, or medicine, or education, that everything having to do with gays is a political issue and that we must, no matter what the consequences, make sure we don't do anything that upsets gays and makes them feel bad and cause them to cry?

There's so much hatred and cruelty in the world it, ... it, ... it makes me want to cry.

It makes some people cry when they think of all the diseases that would be introduced into the blood supply if the ban on homosexuals giving blood were lifted, but these are straight people, and, as everyone knows, it doesn't matter if straight people get upset. They're bigoted anyway.

What matters is when gay feeling bad. And then we have to change public policy. Otherwise they might get upset. And cry. And that's bigoted. And hateful.

Chris Hartman at the Fairness Alliance isn't crying though. He's mad because so many people see the integrity of the nation's blood supply as a public health issue when it's not.

“It is clear discrimination ... written into policy,” says Hartman of the federal ban. “It’s a continued vestige of the fear and prejudice that the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community face.”

Fear? About a high risk group infecting the nation's blood supply? Get over it people!

The bigoted people who are concerned about the integrity of the blood supply are just being selfish. And hateful. They're concerned with, like, protecting people from disease. These are people who don't have indiscriminate sex with people they don't know and they think they have the right to be protected from all the diseases that the people who do have indiscriminate sex with people they don't know.

Bigots.

If they're getting a blood transfusion and they are concerned that a group of people with a rate of HIV infection of 60 times that of the general population giving blood, they need to do a little soul searching and realize how hateful they are being.

Sure, they get infected with HIV, but they would deserve it. It would serve these hateful bigots right.

Michael Shermer: the skeptics' David Barton

2011-12-03T11:44:00.034-05:00

It's amazing how someone who fashions himself a skeptic can be so credulous when it comes to cultural questions involving religion. Michael Shermer, founding editor of Skeptic magazine and author of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, has constructed a skeptical belief about the role of Christianity in America and reinforced it by a wide selection of quotes on his recent blog post from skeptics who have taken exception to Charles Colson's recent remark that America is a Christian nation.

The comments catalogued on Shermer's blog are a litany of largely boneheaded statements on the issue, the unimpressive nature of which is testimony to the lax intellectual standards of professional secularists like Shermer. But Shermer unaccountably finds them impressive, or maybe he thinks that the sheer volume of sophistry demonstrated by them somehow renders the whole post more cogent.

I'm inclined to think that large quantities of bad reasoning renders someone's case weaker, not stronger. But maybe it's just me.

Evangelical writer David Barton, who has attracted attention recently because of his connections to Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, comes under frequent criticism from fundamentalist secularists like Shermer (I haven't seen any comments by Shermer himself on Barton, but they're fairly common among those of his ilk) because of his oversimplifications, occasional inaccuracies, and sometimes fallacious reasoning--as well as for the many of the correct things he says--about the Christian influences on American history and culture. So its kind of ironic that Shermer would employ such a low threshhold of tolerance when it comes to what he includes on his blog.

And it's not just the things he includes on his blog written by other people. Shermer wrote an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times last month criticizing the decision by the U. S. Congress to reaffirm the national motto "In God We Trust." No one observed the strange irony that a man who believes America is a secular nation would be upset because the most significant legislative body of that nation had just reaffirmed a blatantly religious motto by a vote of 396-9. But the irony was lost on the blissfully ignorant Shermer.

On the other hand, maybe that's why he doesn't mention his secularist America thesis in the op-ed, since the congressional vote is at least a prima facie rebuke of it. In any case, the article is a bizarre conglomeration of red herring arguments. He talks about the philosophical problem of evil posed by natural and not so natural disasters (e.g. 9/11) and talks about the benefits of trust between individuals and society.

And these are arguments against the social benefits of religious belief in society ... how?

The David Barton's of the world could be excused if they assented to basically every factual and philosophical assertion in Shermer's piece and still wonder what they have to do with whether the nation having a religious motto is a good thing, since none of the reasons Shermer offers would contradict it.

"It's time to drop the God talk," says Shermer, "and face reality with a steely-eyed visage of the modern understanding of the origin of freedom on which the United States was founded and continues to be secured. God has nothing to do with it."

Secularist atheists are all about having a "steely-eyed visage." Just look at the photo that graces the inside flap of the (intellectually suspect) books of Sam Harris. There he is, looking like a character out of an Ayn Rand novel: defiant, rationalistic, ruggedly handsome, and ... and ... oh, what's the expression? ... "steely-eyed." The problem is that, while a few secularists like Harris can pull of the "steely-eyed" thing, others, like Shermer, look like way too professorial and grandfatherly for the part. And besides, most of these kinds of secularists are of the politically leftist type that Rand would consider wimpy.

Maybe we ought to be thinking of the code heroes of the Hemingway type. But, alas, neither Shermer nor Harris have shot themselves yet. And clearly, if after arguments like the ones Shermer himself articulates in his Los Angeles Times piece and which he includes from others on his recent blog don't cause secularists to shoot themselves, I don't know what will.

On the other hand, maybe its just because these people are all opposed to the possession of firearms. In fact, we ought to be glad (those of us with a compassionate bent) that the L.A. Times copy editor did not have a pistol close by when she realized that she had approved the Shermer sentence quoted above, which perpetrates unspeakable violence on the rules of competent expression. Apparently secularism extends to disbelief in the gods of rhetoric too.

In regard to the comments that grace his blog post (or plague it, depending on your perspective and knowledge of logic), we have:

David Schumacher: that some of the "Christian founders" were involved in the Salem witch trials (an argument which, if "founders" is supposed to refer to anyone involved in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, ignores the fact that anyone participating in the Salem witch trials of 1692 would have been dead by that time)
Adam Qureshi: who asks, "What the heck did we do before Christianity came along a mere 2 thousand years ago?" (Answer: Oh, let's see: enslave, kill, oppress, have government sponsored public games in which people of a certain religion were fed to lions, engage in child sacrifice, and generally disregard human rights because the concept historically required Christianity to formulate. But come to think of it, we still do sacrifice children, don't we? It's called abortion, and most secularists support it)
Eric Lawton: who is under the impression that "Christianity plunged us into centuries of dark ages, superstition and theocracy." (Nevermind the fact that the Church was virtually the only civilizing and institutional presence in the West after the fall of Rome and was solely responsible for saving Western civilization by preserving the great works of antiquity without which there literally would have been no Renaissance, no scientific revolution, no "Enlightenment", and ... no modern secularists)

It goes on.

Colson was spot on in his response to Shermer:

According to Shermer, what really makes people feel free and secure are things like “the rule of law,” “education for the masses,” the establishment of “fair and just laws” and the “equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.”

What Shermer doesn’t tell us is that things like the rule of law, mass education and the other things he credits with making our freedom and security possible didn’t spring fully-formed out of nowhere. They are part of Christianity’s legacy to the West.

To argue that these the things didn't, as a matter of historical fact, arise from the influence of Christianity is just historical ignorance.

Hegel and Nominalism

2011-12-02T15:01:00.001-05:00

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel articulates a powerful argument against nominalism, the belief that universals do not exist. For Hegel, any claim that individual things really exist, while universals do not, undermines itself.

If the nominalist intends to explain his theory to another, he might point to a rose, and say that what really exists is "that thing" which we "call" a rose. We call other things roses as well. But the universal, the "roseness" by virtue of which we call a rose a rose, does not belong to that object (indicating the rose before him). There is no such thing as "rose" or "the red," there are only things in the world to which we apply these names. Put another way, universals are not real, only discrete things are real (e.g., things we call roses, rocks, atoms, etc., but which are actually pure singulars). When Aristotle talks about a human nature shared between individual human beings, the nominalist will say, he is wrongly imposing a mental idea he has upon individual things. The common nature of roses really exists only in the mind, in reality we have only singular objects.

But Hegel notices something strange about such a proof. If we deny the rose has a shared nature, we cannot say that it is really either red or green (only that we call it that) that it is of a certain length (for length too is a universal), and so on. All characteristics (green, long, etc.) are universals, for these can be predicated just as well of other things. If the universals (red, green, long, prickly) do not really exist but are only imposed by the mind upon the thing, what is indicated as really existing is an object that is "pure being." The nominalist cannot say "that rose is what really is", for in such a case he would be saying that an instantiation of a universal is what really exists. Nor can he say "that green thing is what really is, we just call it a rose." He can only say "that thing is what really is."

But in asserting that the thing is what really exists in itself, the nominalist asserts the most abstract universal of all: the Thing or the object. For all that is, is a thing or an object; thing or object is the broadest class of universal.

What we say is: 'This', i.e., the universal This; or, 'it is', i.e., Being in general. Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what ... we mean to say. But language, as we see, is the more truthful; in it, we directly refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a [particular thing] that we mean.

The more strenuously the nominalist tries to assert that what really exists are singular beings, the more strenuously the nominalist actually asserts that what really exists is the abstract universal Thing or pure being. Even when the nominalist says "this is", the nominalist asserts the existence of a universal, for this can be predicated of a rose, a rock, or a house. Language undermines the nominalist's claim; the nominalist asserts the opposite of what he means.

One might suppose this is no problem for the nominalist, for of course language deals in universals, and so of course language imposes these universals on what really is. But in this case, the nominalist cannot provide an argument, for whatever he intends to say, he in fact expresses the opposite.

What horsemeat can do for you

2011-11-30T19:00:00.000-05:00

Congress has lifted the ban on the butchering of horses. A bill apparently snuck through, giving inadequate opportunity for those opposed to it to vote "Neigh."

On the very same day that a few people were getting so hot under the collar about this, a story came across my Google Reader about mixed martial arts heavyweight contender Alistair Overeem (left), who has built a rather impressive physique based on a diet of horsemeat.

But there are a lot of people who think that, while it's okay to slaughter cows, there's some kind of a problem with slaughtering horses. With some people it seems to involve simply the "ick" factor: eating horse meat just doesn't sound very appetizing. But for others seem to have a more philosophical problem with it.

I'm trying to figure out by what criteria one would make this distinction. On what basis would it be humane to kill and eat cows on not humane to kill and eat horses. Maybe some of my readers could let me know what they think of this.

ESPN: A moral obligation to report sexual abuse to the police for thee, but not for me

2011-11-29T07:00:00.003-05:00

On CNN last night, Anderson Cooper interviewed an ESPN reporter. Turns out ESPN had contact with a man who had been sexually victimized by then Syracuse assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine. The man even had an audio tape of a phone conversation he had with Fine's wife in which she talks about Fine's problem with young boys. What did ESPN do with this evidence?

They sat on it.

The reporter said that, because they couldn't find any other victims willing to speak, they felt they couldn't do anything with it. Nor did they bother to take the evidence to police, who have only just found out about the audio tape.

In the time between when ESPN found out about this and now (I think the reporter said 2002, but someone needs to check that), it appears that other boys may have been victimized by Fine.

Where is the outrage?

Remember the outcry against Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who did what he was legally obligated to do, apparently under the assumption that his superiors would do what they were legally obligated to do, but who, say his critics, while he discharged his legal obligation, did not discharge his moral obligations?

Why are the same standards of reporting child abuse to police not applied to the press? The taped phone conversation ESPN had in its possession was at least as damning as anything Paterno knew and ESPN was actually talking to the victim. Why didn't Cooper drill the ESPN reporter and ask him why he didn't discharge his moral obligation to report this to the police?

The reporter went on about how they felt the evidence they had did not meet up to some journalistic criterion for any action. Okay. Fine. They why doesn't that same criterion apply to Paterno?

Not So Fast: Did particles really exceed nature's speed limit?

2011-11-28T19:00:00.002-05:00

By now everyone has read about the discovery that there are renegade particles going way too fast. Albert Einstein had said that nothing could go faster than the speed of light, but several weeks ago, scientists claimed to have discovered some particles that had not gotten that memo.

The particles, called "neutrinos," were clocked at, oh, something above 299,792,458 ~~miles~~ meters per second. So what gives? Were the officials who enforce the laws of nature asleep at their posts, or what? Not only that, but after the first experiment, another one was performed which found the same thing.

But now, say some scientists at an outfit called "ICARUS," this can't be because any particles that traveled faster than the speed of light would have to emit a certain kind of radiation. But these particles don't. Therefore, they couldn't have traveled faster than the speed of light.

Leave it to a group named "ICARUS" to cause this claim to flame out when it got too close to a new discovery.

Anyway, the ICARUS folks are saying that the scientific stopwatches that measured this must have been measuring incorrectly. We'll see.

I say these neutrinos should have to follow the laws of nature like the rest of us.

The police DID know about Sandusky

2011-11-23T16:02:00.000-05:00

His critics say that Joe Paterno should have reported the accusation he heard about him to the police. Then, we are told, something would have been done.

Right?

No one seems to have taken much note of the fact that the police knew a whole lot more than we have any indication Paterno knew a lot earlier than Paterno did. In the 1998 police investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the police appeared to know plenty about Sandusky's behavior, including the fact that he liked to shower with naked little boys.

It apparently wasn't enough to prosecute, but it certainly seemed to be enough to keep an eye on him, which they apparently never did.

If Paterno is morally culpable for not going beyond his legal obligation to report what he knew up the chain of command at Penn State, and Penn State officials were legally culpable for not going to police with the charge, then what kind of culpability to the police themselves bear in this case.

It's an interesting question a lot of people don't seem to want to address.

Do Paterno's critics want to legislate morality?

2011-11-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

I notice that there is now a movement to write into Pennsylvania law that anyone, not just those in highest positions of authority, as is now the case, is required to report suspected child abuse to law enforcement authorities.

Critics of Paterno argue, not implausibly, that, although he was not required by law to report what he heard from McQuery to the police, he was morally obligated to anyway.

The law is being changed to put this moral obligation into law. In other words, they are legislating morality.

But I thought we couldn't do that?

I are Not Home Skooled

2011-11-19T15:51:00.001-05:00

With critics like this, how can home schooling lose? In the comments section of a column in the NY Times about homeschooling, a publicly schooled student expressed her opinion of home schooling in terms which speak to the shape in which public school is in:

In my opinion, i would never turn to home schooling. When you are home schooled, you automaticly loose the whole social experience of school. In the real world you need to be social. Otherwise you’re going to get know where. I understand that the learning education might be to an advantage while homeschooling because its all one on one and you are the only student reciveing all the help you need whenever you need it. I would never home school my child because I would be holding them back from friends and the social life they will need in the feature. I would never even consider home schooling. — Macie P. [emphasis added]

Let's see ... We've got a problem with capitalization of the first person singular pronoun, one word split into two, multiple spelling errors, sentence fragments, awkward phrasing, and hyphenated expressions without the hyphens.

All in one short paragraph. Maybe this is why home school students kick butt at all the spelling bees.

I'm trying to think of what kind of social life it is where it is not important to communicate. But then, if you're just getting together to share your ignorance, I guess it doesn't matter.

The Vanity of Human Wishes: Joe Paterno and the "Bystander Effect"

2011-11-16T07:00:00.007-05:00

David Brooks is not averse to committing psychology. In fact, he does it frequently, a practice we normally turn our noses up at around here. But Brooks makes a good point on the Penn State controversy in a New York Times article titled, "Let's All Feel Superior," a point I have made without the pscyhological dressing, which is that we are reading back into the situation all that we know now and from a viewpoint Paterno could not have had:

First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption. Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.

This seems to me self-evident, but many of these commentators can't wrest themselves from their knowledgable future perspective to see their vanity for what it is. They see, but they don't see. They are incapable of putting themselves in someone else's shoes.

Our culture has become coarse and nothing about the depravity of men is now hidden from us.We now know what people are capable of and we are accustomed to having it paraded before us in all its squalor on a daily basis. But we're talking about a man here who is of another generation. Paterno is 84 years old. He's not only old, he's old school. When someone tells him they witnessed something going on "of a sexual nature," the rest of us have a pretty vivid image of what that might be since we have seen it dramatized for us over and over and over again.

But people of Paterno's generation have not. He probably goes home and watches "Gunsmoke" reruns, not "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit." That's what I do.

I'm loathe to quote "studies" on anything, and so it makes me feel better about the studies that Brooks quotes that it is he who is quoting them. But the next time you hear someone tell you all the heroics he would have performed had he been in Paterno's shoes, remind them of the "Bystander Effect":

Even in cases where people consciously register some offense, they still often don’t intervene. In research done at Penn State and published in 1999, students were asked if they would make a stink if someone made a sexist remark in their presence. Half said yes. When researchers arranged for that to happen, only 16 percent protested.

In another experiment at a different school, 68 percent of students insisted they would refuse to answer if they were asked offensive questions during a job interview. But none actually objected when asked questions like, “Do you think it is appropriate for women to wear bras to work?”

So many people do nothing while witnessing ongoing crimes, psychologists have a name for it: the Bystander Effect.

I have had my differences with Brooks, but the piece is really good. Read the rest here.

The Media Mob

2011-11-15T19:00:00.001-05:00

There is a scene in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird in which Atticus Finch has stationed himself at the door of the jail. Tom Robinson is about to face trial for rape. A lynch mob gathers in front of the jail and confronts Atticus, Robinson's attorney, has anticipated trouble. Tom Robinson is a black man accused of raping a white woman in early 20th century Mississippi. Atticus knows Tom is innocent and is trying to keep him safe.

As Atticus faces down the mob, whose members include many respectable members of the community, his daughter Scout and her brother, seeing his danger, run from behind the bushes where they have been hiding to stand at his side. Atticus, concerned for their safety, demands they leave, but they refuse.

In a scene that marks the high point of the book, Scout looks over the crowd and sees a face that she knows: Walter Cunningham, a poor but proud and hardworking man whom she remembers stopping by the house to pay his legal bill from Atticus with hickory nuts and turnip greens. The movie portrays this scene to perfection: "Hey, Mr. Cunningham," says Scout. "I said, 'Hey, Mr. Cunningham.' How's your entailment gettin' along? Don't you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I'm Jean Louise Finch."

All of a sudden Mr. Cunningham is shamed. The moment has become a human one, one in which his own inhumane attitude--and that of the men around him--has been exposed. He looks down and shuffles his feet. All the men in the mob are made human in that moment. They are embarrassed by the light that has been cast on their own darkness and they disband and go home.

The men didn’t want to wait for the courts to deal with the situation. Tom Robinson had been to the woman’s house. She had been raped. He was black. Ergo, he did it.

When Joe Paterno was fired at Penn State, CNN dropped most of its other news programming to cover the student protests that ensued. The media called them "riots." Admittedly, there was some minor vandalism, but the worst offense occurred when students overturned a news van--an action I myself have felt like performing on a number of occasions.

CNN viewers were treated to a grim Anderson Cooper, lamenting the misguided nature of student sentiment, and expressing abhorrence with the student mob. They were engaging in senseless behavior. These students just didn't understand.

It's worth considering what it is about mobs that we profess to dislike.

What do mobs do? They presume someone is guilty until proven innocent. They jump to conclusions on insufficient evidence. They exact justice indiscriminately. They let their emotions control their judgment. They put the execution of justice before the process of justice. They want justice administered before it can be determined what its administration should consist of.

What is ironic is to watch the media, still in high dudgeon over the student riots, doing itself exactly what mobs do. They have presumed Paterno to be guilty. They have jumped to conclusions about what he knew on insufficient evidence. They have let their emotions cloud their judgment. They have rendered a verdict before any facts have been accepted into evidence. They have supported his firing without the Penn State board even saying what he was fired for.

Mob psychology is easy to get caught up in. Sandusky had been involved in the Penn State program. Paterno was coach. Sandusky sexually abused a boy in the locker room. Ergo, Paterno is guilty.

And the mob continues to gather.

We Interrupt this Kangaroo Court for an Important Message about What We Don't Know about the Penn State Scandal

2011-11-14T07:00:00.003-05:00

Armed with the hindsight of history and with a few scraps of fact (and plenty of fiction) in front of them, the media has embarked on the serious and careful process of recklessly trying Joe Paterno. After his firing by Penn State, they cheered. Now they're taking the next step and saying, with hopeful satisfaction, that he may be facing further charges.

This is the same media, of course, who only recently got through apotheosizing Michael Jackson, who had a disturbing penchant for sleeping with young boys. It's also the same media that looked the other way when gay rights groups associated themselves with advocates of pederasty and pushed for the lowering of age of consent laws.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In any case, when I wrote the previous post on the issue of Penn State and Joe Paterno in which I expressed my dissappointment with what I said I thought was scapegoating by the Penn State board, I had not read the grand jury report. Since then, several friends have expressed their dissatisfaction with my remarks on the basis of their reading of the grand jury report. Susan Perkins Weston, an education consultant, posted the following:

Martin, go read the grand jury report. Paterno knew boys were being raped. He knew that the Penn State aura was part of how the rapist recruited his victims. He knew at Nittany Lion facilities were part of the bait.

When I saw these comments, I thought to myself: Now you've gone and done it, Martin. You should have read the report before saying anything about this issue. You're going to look pretty stupid when you read this thing and see that Paterno was in fact implicated in this whole scandal. You should never have relied on media reports of what the report said (like that ever works).

Well, now I have read the grand jury report, and I have a public announcement to make:

The grand jury report says almost nothing about Paterno and what he knew. I have therefore done a complete 360 degree turn in my opinion and now I think ... just about exactly what I thought before.

In particular the grand jury report doesn't say anything close what Susan says it does. It does not say anything remotely like "Paterno knew boys were being raped." It says only that he knew about one and it wasn't exactly clear what he was told about it. Nor does it in any way indicate explicitly or implicitly that Paterno "knew that the Penn State aura was part of how the rapist recruited his victims." It doesn't say anything about Paterno knowing anything whatsoever about Sandusky recruiting anyone. Nor does it indicate that he "knew [that] Nittany Lion facilities were part of the bait."

Sorry, but it doesn't. And anyone who claims it does needs to quote for us the grand jury report, chapter and verse. I read the whole thing and it's not there.

What it does do is give a litany of the utterly depraved nature of Jerry Sandusky. To use an old-fashioned word, the guy was a pervert. Perversion, however, implies such things and sexual norms, and we all know now that there are no such thing as sexual norms. When it comes to sex, there is now only consensual and non-consensual sex, the former being perfectly permissible in all its permutations, and the second being absolutely wrong even though we no longer think there are absolute rights or wrongs anymore. So maybe I should shy away from the word "pervert."

On second thought, having studied this matter carefully and considered this issue seriously and in depth for about a fraction of a second, I think I'll use it at every available opportunity.

The grand jury report lists for the reader all of the many things Sandusky did which numerous people knew in bits and pieces, and much that nobody knew except for the victims. Wrong things. Perverted things. A lot of people knew a lot of things, but very few individual people knew more than a thing or two about what Sandusky was doing. A small handful of them knew enough to know that Sandusky was committing sickening crimes, and were, under Pennsylvania law, required to report them to police.

You can also say that many of them should, whatever the law may have required, reported them to police even though the law did not require them to do so. In hindsight, and knowing what we now know, this certainly seems to be the case with Paterno.

While many media reports seem to assume that Paterno knew that Sandusky was a sexual ~~predator~~ pervert, the grand jury report indicates one thing and one thing only: that one of his assistants came to him and said he saw Sandusky "fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy" (the report's words, not necessarily Paterno's), which is what Paterno reported to Penn State atheletics director Tim Curley the very next day, a Sunday, when Paterno called him to his home.

That's it. As the report says:

Pennsylvania's mandatory reporting statute for suspected child abuse ... provides that when a staff member reports abuse ... the person in charge of the school or institution has the responsibility and legal obligation to report or cause such a report to be made by telephone and in writing within 48 hours.

If you are not the person in charge of the school or institution, then your job is a little different. Here is what Pennsylvania law requires that you do: "... as a member of the staff of a medical or other public or private institution, school, facility or agency, [the person with a reasonable cause to suspect child abuse] shall immediately notify the person in charge." [emphasis added] This is precisely what Paterno promptly did.

But now Paterno's critics are applying the Monday morning quarterback rule (by which we all state that we know without a doubt what we would have done in this case except that we really don't) by which we attribute all that we now know about Sandusky being a sexual predator to Paterno and conclude that he therefore should have immediately reported it to police. As far as we know McQuery's accusation is the only thing Paterno ever heard about Sandusky's behavior. And if it was, it was probably a bit hard for him to believe about a person he had worked with as a coach for so long. As it was it was an accusation, and he did exactly what the law said he should do.

Now, should he have gone to police with an accusation like this from one of his coaches which he did not witness himself? Again, in hindsight it seems clear, he should have. There's a lot of things which in hindsight could or should have been done. I'd like to think that I would have gone and borrowed a bat from the baseball team and applied it liberally to Sandusky to make sure he was rendered incapable of doing anything to anyone again. But, knowing what we now know, we have lost all sense of what this charge may have looked like to Paterno at the time.

In fact, this is the main problem with the kangaroo court now in progress: it uncritically accepts the fact that Paterno committed some egregious moral blunder by reading back onto the situation at the time all that we now know, most of which almost certainly Paterno did not know.

We don't know, for example, whether Paterno even knew of the 1998 investigation of Sandusky (you know, the pervert), and had he known about it, he would have known that the report basically acquitted Sandusky. Not only that, but it turns out that investigation was shut down by the then head of the campus police--one of the entities that people are now saying Paterno should have known to report the incident to.

I heard one commentator talk about how Paterno should have known about what was going on because Sandusky was his "good friend." Uh, well, no. Sorry. Not only had Paterno informed Sandusky in 1999 that Sandusky would not be his successor, about which Sandusky was quite upset, but relations between the two seemed particularly strained (one report recounts Paterno damning the man with faint praise in a very brief comment at Sandusky's retirement dinner in 1999, after which Paterno promptly left).

It also appears that the two didn't socialized together.

I also have heard several commentators talk about Sandusky working under Paterno when Paterno received the original report from McQuery. Well, sorry again. Sandusky retired in 1999, three years before the incident that is now causing all the controversy. He was not on Paterno's staff at the time. It's not even clear he knew that Sandusky had access to the locker room.

In addition, we have no idea what the conversation was between Paterno and Tim Curley the day after the accusation was reported to Paterno. For all we know, Curley could have assured Paterno this would be dealt with. We just don't know.

As it is, what we have right now is bunch of commentators running around like 5 year-olds saying, "Why if I'd o' been there, I would o' [insert brave sounding heroic exploit here]."

The bottom line is there are too many unknowns to say much about anything relating to Paterno in this case. Maybe he knew everything that went on. Maybe he participated in a cover-up. Maybe he protected Sandusky. All that seems very unlikely given what we know, but who knows what further investigation will turn up in time.

My point was simply that there was insufficient reason to fire Paterno, a conclusion lent credence by the interesting coincidental fact that the board never provided one.

But observers far and near, who have almost literally nothing to base their charges on, are out in force announcing the verdict against Joe. If we're trying to figure out where injustices have been committed, however, it's probably not a good idea to commit them in the process.

Ecce Homo: Why Penn State had to fire a guy who didn't deserve to be fired

2011-11-11T07:00:00.004-05:00

Joe Paterno was a good guy. No one denies it. That he made a mistake in not doing more in dealing with coach Sandusky is something even he admits. But there is the feeling that an injustice has been done to him that just doesn't seem to go away.

One thing is clear: none of the people who voted for his dismissal has done so much for so many as he has. He was fired by people who will never be as great as he is.

If the facts of the case were clearer his firing wouldn't seem so problematic. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and it's not clear at all that Paterno knew all the things he would have had to know in order to bear the level of culpability the board would have to attribute to him to justify the way they treated him in the end. In fact, when whoever it was from the Penn State board made the call to tell him he was dismissed, he asked what the problem was with serving the remaining several games of the season (He had just announced his retirement at the fast-approaching end of the season). They couldn't tell him why.

But they didn't need to have any reasons to fire Joe Paterno. That was not what this was about.

My theory is that the board felt like they could not afford to do the appropriate thing here, which was to let Joe go at the end of the season, which is almost here. It had to be seen as forcing him out. There was no need for him to go in the ignominious way in which they forced him to go. It wasn't something he deserved. But it was something board needed to do in order to look like it had done something when it was too late to do anything that really mattered.

If you don't want someone else to shoot you, one of the ways to prevent it is to shoot yourself. And that's what Penn State's board decided the university must do. Committing institutional suicide was the safest thing for it to do.

Part of the measure of a man is how he reacts when people treat him as if he were less than he was. Paterno's reaction to his dismissal was to say simply that he prayed for the victims. Even after he was treated as less than he was, he still acted as if it wasn't about him.

And yet it was.

In the end, the problem was that it was Penn State as an institution that was sullied in the whole episode. And Joe Paterno had done so much for the university for so many years that he was the embodiment of the university. It wouldn't have mattered if he had never known about any of it. He would still have had to be fired.

The institution needed a scapegoat to bear the guilt. They found one: the guy who is Penn State. It was their way of washing their hands of the whole affair. John Surma, vice chairman of the board of trustees, was the one who made the announcement. It was quick and clean. They had no Barrabas; all they had was Joe.

I wonder if anyone thought to ask Surma's wife if she had had any strange dreams the night before.

Joe Paterno was not fired for what he did: he was fired for who he was. He was a great man. And it was his own greatness that made him the guy who had to be gotten rid of.

Now the institution can go on. But it isn't Penn State anymore. It's just another college.

Paying for Mediocrity: More on public school teacher pay

2011-11-10T19:00:00.001-05:00

In response to my recent post on public school teachers salaries, a number of commenters came to the defense of the public education establishment. These are people, mind you, who criticize conservatives in general and private Christian educators in particular for a lack of intellectual facility. They criticize these people, but defend a system which scrapes the bottom of the academic barrel when it comes to staffing teaching positions.

Art, a University of Kentucky science professor and veteran member of the Peanut Gallery here, after trying to ignore benefits in his argument that public school teachallenged me to produce some numbers to substantiate my charge that, relative to the private sector (and their educational achievements) public school teachers are not only aren't underpaid, but may, in fact, be overpaid.

So after a little snooping, here are some figures:

According to the Teaching Jobs Portal, the salary for a first year Kentucky teacher with minimal qualifications (and given the level of academic accomplishment for these people, this is pretty low) is $23,848.

The average annual base salary for a KY teacher in 2009 was $46,417. That's with 15 weeks of vacation per year, and a retirement benefit of 2.5 percent of your salary multiplied by the number of years served. In other words, if you work for 25 years, you will make, for your retirement, over 60 percent of your regular salary.

Oh, and that's a guaranteed retirement benefit. The Kentucky Teacher Retirement System provides what is called a defined benefit retirement program. That means that no matter what the return on investment, they will get the 2.5 percent. Private companies, on the other hand, have almost entirely abandoned defined benefit plans because of what happens in times like we're in now, when market conditions result in underfunded plans. They use defined contribution plans (the most popular being 401K plans) where the benefits is determined solely by the amount your account has gained due to the investment return.

I was a corporate trust officer in the late 80s/early 90s and administered retirement plans for small companies. None of our clients used defined benefit plans, and the few big companies that still had them were in the process of phasing them out because they were becoming unaffordable. Except the big companies forced into keeping them by unions, of course.

And then there are the health benefits. I couldn't find any aggregate statistics for health benefits, but suffice it to say public school teachers get a subsidized health care benefit.

The only numbers I could find on comparative salaries between public and privates were from NCES, which reports that "in 2007–08, the average annual base salary of regular full-time public school teachers ($49,600) was higher than the average annual base salary of regular full-time private school teachers ($36,300)." And that latter figure has got to be overstated. I have dealt with a lot of private schools and none of them has a base salary that high. And needless to say, most private school teachers get no retirement benefits or subsidized health care. Nor do they get job protection. Not only that: public school teachers (at least in KY) get tenure after four years.

Maybe Art could tell us what other private professionals make this kind of money combined with these kinds of benefits. How many of them have guaranteed retirement benefits? How many of them get 15 weeks of vacation time? How many have their jobs are protected after four years?

And we haven't even talked about the sorry state of their academic accomplishment--for people responsible for educating our nation's children no less. That's next up.

A Heckuva Mandate: Beshear received 155,307 fewer votes Tuesday than he did in 2007

2011-11-10T07:00:00.004-05:00

Not only does no one know what Steve Beshear's claimed mandate is a mandate for, but unmentioned by any of the analysis I have seen is the fact that Beshear received fewer votes in 2011 than he received in 2007.

Beshear garnered 464,245 votes on Tuesday. In 2007, however, he collected 619,552 votes, according to the Kentucky State Board of Elections website. That's 155,307 votes fewer in 2011 than in 2007.

Not exactly a huge electoral pat on the back.

Now a Beshear supporter could argue that the lower number of votes in 2011 was because of lower voter turnout. Would they be right? OF COURSE. But ten bucks says that the person giving this excuse is also blandly accepting Beshear's claim of a mandate, a claim made equally preposterous by taking into consideration a low voter turnout in 2011.

Jennifer Moore, you there?

Does Steve Beshear have a Mandate?

2011-11-09T07:00:00.003-05:00

The total number of registered voters in Kentucky is 2,944,603 according to the Voter Registration Statistics Report. Steve Beshear received 464,657 votes yesterday according the unofficial tally. If you divide 464,657 by 2,944,603, you get 15.78%.

Can you have a mandate if you received the votes of only 15.78% of the registered voters in your state?

Just askin'.

Are public teachers overpaid?

2011-11-08T07:00:00.002-05:00

According to today's Wall Street Journal, "combining salaries, fringe benefits and job security, we have calculated that public school teachers receive around 52% more in average compensation than they could earn in the private sector."

The next time teachers unions come, tin cup in hand, begging for more money, we need not only to say "No," but to ask for a refund.

HT: Carpe Diem

Ten Best Blogs (and a few other good ones)

2011-11-07T07:00:00.001-05:00

I suppose I should really call this simply, "The Blogs I Read the Most." That doesn't necessarily entail that they are the best things going, just that they are good and happen to appeal to what interests me most in life right now. I am interested in religion (mostly from a cultural perspective), literature (mostly of the classic type), philosophy (mostly of the Aristotelian-Thomistic variety), and politics (I'm of a traditionalist conservative bent, but just keeping up with the current controversies determines what I like here, and am particularly interested in the cultural implications of religion and science), in roughly that order:

Arts & Letters Daily: Just three short article summaries (from other websites) with links, having to do with literature and culture. I will click on at least one article link on about every other post, which is a pretty high percentage for me.

3 Quarks Daily: I'm still not sure what the principle of selection is for this blog, but it has an amazing number of interesting article selections from the web on literature, science, and culture generally.

Ed Feser's Blog: Feser is an Aristotelian-Thomist philosopher from California who is, for my money, among the top two or three most formidable apologists for historic Christianity writing today.

Carpe Diem: The proprietor of this blog is Mark Perry, a conservative economist at the University of Michigan. Maybe it's Perry's perpetual optimism that drives be to this blog again and again. Or maybe its the excellent graphs he uses to show current economic trends. In any case, his posts are short and informative, and always give you some great piece of information the left-wingers don't want you to know.

First Things: On the Square: Years ago, I read National Review cover to cover. That was back when it had as much of a cultural focus as a policy and political focus. These days it is First Things magazine, which covers religion and culture, that I read cover to cover. It is the best thing going. The blog is great too.

The Art of Manliness: This is a partly (but only partly) tongue-in-cheek blog that discusses the way men should behave. It alternately informs and entertains--sometimes both. I learned how to properly cut a Thanksgiving turkey from this site, discovered a great adventure author from a post about great books for boys, discovered several easy-to-fix man meals for when the little woman was away, and proper table etiquette for social occasions. Every article will have you chuckling because the funny take it has on some common issue you didn't realize before reading it that you really did need to know more about. Oh, and then there is the "Mustache Style Guide," and "How to Break Down a Door: An Illustrated Guide." You gotta love it.

Atlantic Wire: This is the blog of Atlantic Magazine. Atlantic has the best bead on cultural trends of any publication I have seen. Articles like "The End of Men," and the recent "What Me Marry?" don't always have the best prescriptions (in fact, they often have the wrong prescriptions), but they always have a great bead on the problem and include a wealth of interesting angles on cultural problems. This same nose for the latest thing characterizes the blog, which also has very comprehensive coverage of cultural and political events and trends.

Cranach: The Blog of Veith: Gene Edward Veith is a Lutheran academic who is currently the Dean of Academics at Patrick Henry College. A prolific and insightful writer, he always seems to be onto some article or issue which you won't find anywhere else.

Insight Scoop & CatholicVote.org: The two best Catholic blogs on the net. Insight Scoop is the blog of Ignatius Press, the most significant (and traditional) Catholic publisher in the United States. Carl Olson does a great job informing readers of new books and cultural trends of interest to Catholics. CatholicVote.org is a great source of current events having to do with cultural and politics from a Catholic perspective. Well written too.

SPECIAL CATEGORIES:

Best Education Blog: CiRCE Institute: An organization devoted to promoting classical Christian education. Run by Andrew Kern and his son David, who also write for it, you will find insights on education that no one else is making.

Worst Philosophy Blog: Why Evolution is True: Atheist Jerry Coyne, a biologist at the University of Minnesota is not a philosopher, a fact of which he seems entirely unaware, but which is evident to any moderately conscious reader from his numerous attempts to impugn theism. It has all the entertainment value of watching a guy fire a gun the barrel of which has been bent back to point at the person firing it (in a Bugs Bunny sort of way). Watch the intrepid Jerry as he confuses empiricism and rationality, misstates the cosmological argument for the existence of God, and mistakes ad hominem attacks for legitimate arguments. You can get an extra bonus whenever Ed Feser, tiring of the silliness, swats him down every couple months. It's sort of like watching somebody with good aim at the dunking booth at the fair.

Best Conservative Kentucky Political Blog (besides mine, of course): Bluegrass Bulletin: Marc Carey runs this blog which sports the best take on political events in Kentucky from a conservative perspective. He also runs great political cartoons.

Best Agrarian Blog: Front Porch Republic: Run (at least in part, I'm not sure) by Jeremy Beers, formerly the head of ISI Books, my favorite book publisher. Great articles from an agrarian, Distributist perspective on culture, economics, and politics.

Best Thomist Blog: Just Thomism: Okay, let's face it: There was not a lot to choose from here. But James Chastek's blog on Thomist philosophy is really excellent. You've got to pay attention here, though, this is heavy stuff. Thomists have the most complete and explanatory world view. Everything has a place. And Chastek talks about, well, just about anything.

Best ... Well, I'm Not Sure, But I Wanted to Mention This Blog Anyway: Mere Comments: The blog of Touchstone magazine, which is up there with First Things, Modern Age, The Intercollegiate Review, and The New Criterion for best cultural journals, but written at a slightly more popular level. Anthony Esolen's articles are worth the price of the subscription. Esolen writes for the blog too and so do several Touchstone editors and authors.

Is Steve Beshear Untouchable? The KY media's double standard on religion

2011-11-05T21:16:00.025-04:00

Let's see if I've got this straight: Steve Beshear goes to a solemn Hindu religious rite and makes it into a cheap campaign photo op and it's Beshear's critics who are disrespecting the religion?

This, at least, seems to be the attitude of the Kentucky’s liberal media.

Let's be honest here. If David Williams had gone to a Christian church and participated in some religious ceremony and his Senate office had sent out photos of it, editorial writers from the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader would be falling all over themselves lamenting that Williams was pandering to his base—if not violating the separation between church and state—and their reporters would be calling up left-wing professors at the state's universities and writing stories about it.

In Friday's CJ, Peter Smith took both me and Republican gubernatorial candidate David Williams to task for remarks about Beshear’s very solemn and respectful exploitation of a Hindu rite. He and other reporters covering the story went out and got the comments of Hindu organizations, at least one of which demanded an apology from Williams—an apology they rightly never got.

Smith charges Williams—who had portrayed Beshear as sitting in the Lotus Position, with a red mark on his forehead, bowing and praying to Hindu deities—with mischaracterizing the Hindu ceremony:

In fact, that incorrectly describes Beshear’s sitting posture or that of anyone else in the photo. None of them could be mistaken for assuming the tight, cross-legged meditative lotus position.

The Lotus Position, it turns out, is a cross-legged sitting posture in which each foot rests on the opposite thigh. In addition, he says:

Hindus have said that sitting in the ceremonial pit of such a ceremony and receiving the ceremonial “tilak” on the forehead does not necessarily mean one is engaging in Hindu worship.

In other words, the governor wasn’t sitting in the Lotus Position receiving the ceremonial “tilak” on the forehead with his eyes closed and his head bowed and with incense burning in a religious ceremony that involves making offerings to various gods and worshipping them.

No. It wasn't anything like that. All he was doing was sitting cross-legged receiving the ceremonial “tilak” on the forehead with his eyes closed and his head bowed and with incense burning in a religious ceremony that involves making offerings to various gods and not worshipping them.

Glad we’ve got that cleared up. I mean, who could possibly have mistaken one for the other?

Beshear claims to be a Christian. But one thing is for sure: Shadrach the governor is not. Or Meshach. Or Abednego. This is clearly not a man who will ever find himself in a lion's den--not with all the available alternatives.

And then, of course, there was my post, in which I made light of the whole thing and employed a number of blatant and obvious stereotypes in order to do it. The problem there? I used blatant and obvious stereotypes to do it.

He’s got me there.

And then there was the fact that I was making light of it at all. My post “makes one-liners out of issues that deserve serious discussion in their own context.”

Well, I suppose if my intention had been to discuss the issue seriously in its own context I would have discussed the issue seriously in its own context. But as it so happens that was not my intention.

In fact, getting serious about religion is not something the media does particularly well. Smith is certainly well-intentioned, but here is his comment on the Hindu caste system:

The oppression of Hindu untouchables is also real, serious—and also draws resistance from within the Hindu community itself. The Hindu American Foundation says “caste-based discrimination is not, and has never been, intrinsic to the essential teachings of Hinduism.”

And it's David Williams who is mischaracterizing Hinduism? Not only has the caste system been considered (in and outside of the religion) as an essential part of Hinduism throughout its history, but it is integral to its belief in reincarnation, and rebellion against it is considered to result in a lower rebirth in the next life. In fact, the only thing that has moderated the caste system in recent times is the introduction of Western beliefs into Indian thinking.

This is the thing about multiculturalism: the Western liberals who spout it never allow the real beliefs of non-Western thought systems to complicate their presentation of it. Many non-Western beliefs, it turns out, are racist and sexist, among other unfortunate things. So they have to clean it up first and make it presentable. The next thing you know we'll be reading news stories about how Hinduism isn't polytheistic.

CJ reporters need to be careful about how they characterize Hinduism. If they're not careful, they could end up being reborn as politicians.

Pop Quiz: Which act displays the more serious attitude toward a religion: participating in one of its holy rites for purposes of a cheap political photo op (or, for that matter, downplaying its potentially objectionable beliefs), or taking it for what it is and arguing against it because you think it's wrong?

If you take Hinduism seriously, as Williams clearly did, you’re intolerant. If you make light of it, then you’re insensitive because you’re not taking it seriously. It’s important to realize the dilemma you can get into here.

Otherwise you might think it was just bad Karma.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Peter is a great guy and really wasn’t as hard on me as I suppose he could have been. But I’m trying to remember the last time he or any other CJ reporter went out and sought a request for apology from a Protestant denomination or Catholic church for, say, one of State Rep. Tom Burch’s hostile outbursts during one of his committee meetings at the State Capitol—or for that many any of the frequent and equally hostile remarks about Christianity made by State Sen. Kathy Stein.

In fact, I’m trying very hard to think of any similar display of media indignation at any instance of ill-intentioned criticism of Christianity and I’m just not coming up with anything.

Maybe I’ll remember it in my next life.

In fact, has Smith ever heard of the Page One Kentucky blog (That’s a rhetorical question. Of course he has. All the CJ reporters read it), where Jake Payne takes almost daily potshots at conservative Christianity? Has he ever written a column condemning Payne for religious intolerance?

Ever?

When it's a liberal Democrat showing favor to a non-Western religion, the media sings its hosannas to the principle of religious tolerance, but when it's a conservative Republican showing favor to Christianity, they call fire down from heaven.

Even a liberal Democrat can't escape impaling himself on one or the other horn of the media's contradictory Tolerance standard. Just compare on the one hand the treatment Beshear himself received when he actually participated in a Hindu ceremony for the camera (solemn and starry-eyed respect for all the religions of the earth and lectures about all the world singing together in perfect harmony), and on the other when Beshear granted tax incentives for the building of the Ark Park, which is formally not even a religious organization (grim rhetorical expressions and hostile, school-marmish finger-wagging about how we should be very careful about crossing the line between church and state—the only thing the media thinks is really holy).

Will there be any observations forthcoming from the state media about the inconsistency between the Beshear administration renaming the state Christmas tree the state “Holiday” tree because it is too religion specific on the one hand, and on the other actually participating in a religion-specific Hindu ceremony?

If the media worshipped a god, it would be the Roman god Janus, who has two faces pointing in opposite directions.

Gov. Steve Beshear, in the lotus position

2011-11-03T07:00:00.000-04:00

If you've been in the state Capitol building in Frankfort recently and thought you heard sitar music wafting out of the governor's office, now you know why. This is a picture of Gov. Steve Beshear, participating in a Hindu "ground blessing" ceremony. Yes, that is him there, second from the right, sitting in the lotus position, probably praying that he will someday be reincarnated as a real governor.

He apparently feels so comfortable with his lead in the polls going into next Tuesday that he considers himself untouchable. And it's a good thing for him. I mean, if he got beat, what would he do? Go sell flowers on the street corner?

But just imagine being First Lady Jane, who'll now have to cremate herself on Steve's funeral pyre when he dies. Bummer.

Now we know why the governor wanted to change the state's Christmas tree to a "Holiday" tree.

Rush Limbaugh attacks the education of the founding fathers

2011-11-02T07:30:00.005-04:00

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh tied his whole brain, not just half of it, behind his back. In the process he ended up sounding a whole lot like the cultural barbarians he claims to be fighting.

Limbaugh, channeling his inner Gradgrind, launched on a tirade today against classical education, saying that a classical studies degree from college is a "worthless degree." Provoked by a sign-carrying Wall Street occupier who bemoaned her "useless" classical studies degree and her resulting lack of employment, the conservative talk show host charged colleges with scamming students by not telling them that their degrees in classical studies are "worthless" and won't result in being able to find a job.

"Can you tell me where you would go to apply for a job with a classical studies degree?" asked Limbaugh. "[S]omebody at the university ought to say, 'Babe, you are wasting your time in a nothing major, we are stealing your money, you're going to be qualified for jack excrement when you get out of here."

He then went on to question what the term even meant:

Any of you at random listening all across the fruited plain, what the **** is classical studies? What classics are studied? Or is it learning how to study in a classical way? Or is it learning how to study in a classy as opposed to unclassy way? And what about unclassical studies? Why does nobody care about the unclassics? What are the classics? And how are the classics studied? Oh, so you're going to become an expert in Dickens? You're assuming it's literature? You're assuming we're talking about classical literature here? What if its classical women's studies? What if it's classical feminism? Who the Hell knows what it is?

... For all of you young skulls full of mush out there, ...when you go to college, do not do classical studies. What the **** is it anyway?

The segment reminded me of when I walked into the Republican leadership offices of our state senate one day and, while I was waiting to see someone, watched Glen Beck on the office monitor give a short disquisition on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. It's times like these that you just fell embarrassed for the person. And its times like this that Limbaugh's own lack of formal education begins to loom large.

His extended sililoquy on the subject was, to be charitable, a confused pastiche of half-thought out rants about liberal colleges and socialism and communism and feminism and postmodernism, the perceived association with which is somehow supposed to constitute an indictment of classical education.

Limbaugh was right, of course, about the state of higher education, about colleges who don't tell students that taking out loans for majors that are not designed to make you marketable, and even about the state of many classical studies departments.

But the state of higher education has affected the fate of all the academic disciplines; going into debt as a business major (or political science, or economics, or psychology, or a whole host of majors) makes you in many cases no more marketable and no less financially unsound than doing it to fund a classical studies degree; and if many colleges have given way to political correctness in classical studies, that is hardly an indictment of reading the classics. The fact that the academic left has corrupted many classics departments is not a reason to train our fire on the classics: it's a reason to defend them.

The classics are the natural ally of conservatism, and when prominent conservatives like Limbaugh use the excuse of the liberal assault on them to assault them himself, he is only contributing to the decline of the civilization he prides himself on defending.

In fact, in many ways Limbaugh's attack on classical education was an unfortunate case of friendly fire. Before the advent of the modern education agenda we see at work now, studying the classics was what education consisted of--almost exclusively. In fact, we ought to be glad the founding fathers didn't have Limbaugh's attitude about classical studies, since it was through their knowledge of classical political theory that they were able to frame the government which we still enjoy to this day.

The education of the founding period was universally classical. When you went to school, you studied Latin and maybe Greek--only occasionally Hebrew. And you used that knowledge to study the great works of Western civilization in their original languages. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson all had a solid classical education, and quoted classical authors interminably. The framers were soaked and steeped in Aristotle's Politics, Publius' Histories, and Cicero's De Re Publica, De Legibus, and De Officiis. They read them, they quoted them, they discussed them, and they debated them--and they leaned heavily on them in their construction of the American republic.

I defy anyone to read the letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and say that these men weren't thoroughly grounded in the great works of Western civilization--or that it didn't make a difference in what they thought and did.

Without this knowledge, this country would not exist as we know it.

Lurking behind Limbaugh's remarks were assumptions that real conservatives have no business employing, among which is the idea that the purpose of education is job training. In fact, part of the irony of Limbaugh's remarks here is that he's marching under the same flag as people like Hilary Clinton, whose utilitarian views on cultural issues, including education, Limbaugh claims to despise.

Modern education is a confused and toxic admixture of progressivism and pragmatism. Progressivism is the idea that schools should be used to change the culture, and is on clear display in the political correctness and secular religion of Diversity that infect schools from Kindergarten to college. Pragmatism is the idea that schools should be used to fit students to the present culture, and takes the form primarily of vocationalism.

Many people think that public schools fail at what they try to do. And that is partly true. They do a pretty good job of political indoctrination--a process that is not terribly complicated--but do a pretty poor job making students employable. But the primary problem with schools is that they don't even try to do what they should be trying to do.

The alternative to progressivism and pragmatism is the philosophy of education that preceded them: classical education. The purpose of classical education was neither to change culture through political indoctrination nor to fit children to the culture through vocationalism. The purpose of every school before the advent of John Dewey and others in the late 19th century was to pass on a culture, and one culture in particular: the culture of the Christian West.

The sad thing about comments like these from Limbaugh is that, although he spurns the progressivist half of the liberal political agenda, he accepts the pragmatist half of it hook, line, and sinker. The utilitarian idea that education must make a quantifiable contribution to the money economy is the product of the thinking of those Edmund Burke, the progenitor of modern conservatism, called "sophisters and calculators."

In fact, the modern conservative tradition that extents back to Burke and that lives on into this century in the persons of T. S. Eliot and Russell Kirk will have no truck with the idea that education is a purely instrumental concern. In fact, when I listened to the recording of Limbaugh's show yesterday, I couldn't help but imagine people like Burke, Eliot, and Kirk rolling over in their graves.

Finally, let's answer Rush's main question: "What the **** is 'classical studies'?"

Classical studies--and this may come as a shock to people who don't read very carefully--is studying the classics, and it is a part of the broader educational program that is more commonly called "classical education," which is, in its ideal form, a study of literature, language, and the humanities, as well as the disciplines of math and science. It is the academic focus on what Matthew Arnold once called "the best that has been thought and said," as well as training in the linguistic and mathematical disciplines of the liberal arts. It not only teaches what to think, more importantly it teaches you how to think--something most of our academic institutions have admittedly abandoned.

An education like this would certainly have prevented Limbaugh from making such a misguided attack on a program of study that ought to be championed by conservatives, not spurned by them.

Remember when personal character didn't matter for a president?

2011-11-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to remember CNN devoting almost a whole evening to the allegations of sexual harassment against Bill Clinton as soon as they surfaced (like they did last night on the Herman Cain "sexual harassment" allegations), but I'm having trouble calling it to mind.

Must be my faulty memory.

The Divine Plight of Kings

2011-11-01T07:00:00.002-04:00

The Atlantic Wire reports that the nations of the British Commonwealth have voted that the succession to the British throne no longer privilege male descendants over females. An eldest son, in other words, should have no prior right to the throne over an eldest daughter--the reason being that primogeniture is an old-fashioned notion out of step with the times.

The restriction barring the heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic was also deemed inconsistent with modern sensibilities.

We're so glad we have people like this to bring the British monarchy into complete alignment with the modern world.

This made us think of other, similar articles we may be soon reading in the world media:

"Updating the operating system on your Royal manual typewriter"
"New apps for your rotary telephone";
"Outfitting your horse drawn buggy with air conditioning"
"The newest 8-track technology"
"How to sharpen the picture on your black and white television"
"Tips on how to take great Polaroid pictures"

Atheists with judgmentalism issues

2011-10-31T19:00:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins says he refuses to debate Christian apologist William Lane Craig is that Craig, according to Dawkins, is "a deplorable apologist for genocide" because of Craig's explanation of the Old Testament passages on the Hebrew invasion of Canaan.

These atheists are so judgmental anymore. You'd think they believed in some absolute, universal morality or something.

Quiet Please. Atheist Zone.

2011-10-31T07:00:00.002-04:00

Increasingly wimpy atheists, who apparently lay awake nights worrying that someone, somewhere might be having religious thoughts, have just had their nights rendered sleepless by a Kentucky appeals court. The court ruled that language in Kentucky's homeland security law "stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth" doesn't violate the state's constitution because, uh, you know, the same acknowledgement of God is in the preamble of the state's constitution.

Next thing you know atheists will be arguing that the Constitution is unconstitutional--which, come to think of it, is exactly what they were indirectly arguing in this case.

American Atheists, the cross-appellant in the suit, was suing because the law was causing them to suffer sleep disorders and "mental pain and anguish."

Many of us remember the good old days, when atheists didn't cower in fear at the mere mention of God. In fact, all that talk from the New Atheists about how brave they are because they face the world without the comfort of religion is kind of hard to square with atheist groups like this one whose tender psyches are reduced to a trembling puddle of emotions whenever they hear religious language.

They just don't make atheists like they used to.

On Ducking Debates: Is Dawkins really chickening out?

2011-10-24T07:00:00.000-04:00

I don't normally comment on charges that the-fact-that-someone-won't-debate-someone-else-so-he-must-be-scared. You might not want to debate someone for a lot of reasons. But the recent dust-up over Richard Dawkin's refusal to debate Christian philosopher William Lane Craig just begs for comment.

Dawkins said in the Guardian recently that he won't debate Craig despite Craig's challenge to meet him this month at Oxford. Dawkins gives several reasons for avoiding Craig, and none of them seem very convincing. And putting them all together doesn't add up to much either.

Here is philosopher Victor Reppert, commenting on what indeed seems like Dawkins avoiding a debate because he's scared (and someone with Dawkin's lack of knowledge of philosophy ought to be):

Dawkins makes the claim that the theist is delusional, by which I take it he means that the case against theism is overwhelming. Yet he doesn't, in any serious way, engage any of the arguments in natural theology, and he seems to imply that it is beneath him to engage leading defenders of belief in the existence of God, and their arguments. I don't care whether he does it in a debate format or some other format, but somewhere, somehow, he needs to show that he knows how the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Thomistic Cosmological Argument restrict the class of what needs a cause, so that a simplistic "Who made God" can't refute them in any direct way.

Craig is a leading defender of arguments for the existence of God. Regardless of whether some of his statements are morally repugnant, Dawkins needs to come to terms with him and those like him if he is to have any credibility with respect to his delusion charges. Putting his nose in the air with the "Courtier's Reply" does not replace confronting the actual relevant arguments.

Read the rest here.

Traci Lee Simmons to speak at Highlands Latin School tonight.

2011-10-21T15:57:00.000-04:00

Highlands Latin School's
2nd Annual Community Lecture Series
Friday, October 21, 2011

You're cordially invited to join us this Friday, October 21, at 7:00PM!

Highlands Latin School is pleased to welcome esteemed author, Tracy Lee Simmons (see his bio below), on Friday, October 21, 2011, at 7:00PM, in the Sanctuary of our Crescent Hill Campus (2800 Frankfort Ave). Mr. Simmons' lecture on "Classical Education and America's Future" is free and open to the public. All are welcome to attend!

Tracy Lee Simmons has been a working journalist, editor, and writer for over 20 years. He holds a Master’s Degree in Classics from Oxford. He has written for newspapers, magazines, and journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, American Enterprise, The New Criterion, and The Sewanee Review, and he once served as an Associate Editor for National Review under William F. Buckley, Jr. He published Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin in 2002, which won a Choice Award for “Outstanding Academic Title” for that year. He continues to write regularly on literary, historical, and cultural topics.

Quaddafi is dead. Long live progressive leadership.

2011-10-20T21:30:00.001-04:00

There's not much to say about the reported death of Qaddafi, longtime Libyan tyrant. I will just mark his end by recounting my first awareness of him.

I was in 7th grade at Dapplegray Middle School in Rolling Hills Estates, California in the early 1970s. We (all of us students) were herded into the gym, where we saw a film on the incredible economic miracle taking place in an African country most of us had never heard of. And this was all taking place, we were told by the film's narrator, under the rule of a progressive new leader.

The country was Libya, and the progressive leader was Quaddafi.

Public schools. You gotta love 'em.

Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your brains!

2011-10-20T10:16:00.000-04:00

White people. Occupying Wall Street. Protesting rich people who take advantage of other people. Funded in part by George Soros. Billionaire hedge fund manager. Who was convicted of insider trading in in France in 2002.

Just thought I'd mention it.

"Rebels Without a Clue" runs in Lexington Herald Leader

2011-10-19T07:00:00.000-04:00

My article "Rebels Without a Clue" was published in Friday's Lexington Herald-Leader.

And one more thing...

2011-10-19T00:07:00.000-04:00

I should have added to the last post on whether Christians should vote for Mormons one other thing (and this in relation to Perry's remark that he disagreed with Pastor Jeffress): I would rather vote for a Mormon who thought that Mormonism was Christian than a Christian who thought Mormonism was Christian--largely because the latter, but not necessarily the former, should know better.

Should you vote for a Mormon?

2011-10-18T19:00:00.001-04:00

You can say the right thing at the wrong time. And this appears to be what has happened on the issue of Romney's Mormonism.

Okay, for starters, I have no political problem voting for a Mormon candidate for office. In fact, if I was faced with a choice between an atheist candidate who would do the right thing and a Christian candidate who would do the wrong thing, then, in principle, I would vote for the atheist candidate without blinking. As Gene Veith has recently reminded us, Luther once said, "I'd rather be ruled by a smart Turk (Muslim) than a stupid Christian."

So when someone like Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor and Perry supporter, made this an issue the other day, it really complicated things politically, even for people like me. The problem lies in connecting together the question "Should I vote for Mitt Romney since he is a Mormon?" and the completely different question "Is Mormonism Christian?"

What we need here is de-linkage. The two questions have little to do with each other: the answer to one should have little to do with the answer to the other. Unfortunately, it may be too late, practically speaking, to make that distinction.

The answer to the second question, "Is Mormonism Christian?" is: No, of course it's not. Unfortunately, this question has been sort of muddled by the use of the word "cult." Is Mormonism a cult? Sure it is. So is Methodism, Lutheranism, and Pentacostalism--and Catholicism. Cultus is a Latin word that means "worship" or "form of worship." Is Mormonism a form of worship? Yes it is. So are all Christian sects, Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic.

As Pastor Jeffress himself rightly pointed out, he was using the term in a modern evangelical religious sense to mean "non-Christian sect," and not the sociological sense of a culturally deviant and dangerous religious group a la Jim Jones. But it still muddies the waters, maybe hopelessly.

What Jeffress was really saying was that Mormonism was not a Christian sect. He was right here too. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, Christianity is defined as "the beliefs of the apostles." That is its original and still dispositive meaning. Those beliefs were refined and extrapolated by the seven ecumenical councils, the last of which was the Council of Nicea, which produced the Nicene Creed, the greatest and most definitive statement of Christian belief. A few of us would add a few more councils, here, but that's a different issue.

So the answer to whether Mormonism is Christian is easy to decide: Are their beliefs consistent with the beliefs of the Apostles as they were expressed in the New Testament and as they were articulated in the Nicene Creed? And the clear answer is "No."

If you take any cardinal doctrine of Christianity and ask whether the Mormon Church unconditionally accepts it, the answer is "No." The Atonement. The Resurrection. The Virgin Birth. The unique deity of Christ. They may have beliefs that sound similar, but just a little scratching under the surface shows they do not accept these beliefs as historically defined by the Church.

Heck, they're not even monotheistic.

That doesn't mean they're not good people, or that they ought to be culturally marginalized, or that any one of them can't be president. It just means that they are not within even the broad definition of the Christian Church.

All that being said, if voting for Romney for president is going to require culturally that we all say nicely that his religion is Christian, then a cultural problem is created that affects my political decision. It gives the political position, which is otherwise unproblematic, a negative cultural consequence.

This wouldn't be Romney's fault. It will be the fault of people like Pastor Jeffress, even though he's right about Mormonism.

Is forced busing needed to add some color to the white faces Occupying Wall Street?

2011-10-18T07:00:00.000-04:00

Remember all those charges of racism against the Tea Party? Well, now the highest ranked Tea Party candidate in the Republican primary is Black, and white folks are Occupying Wall Street.

It's a crazy world.

Strange Bedfellows

2011-10-17T23:39:00.000-04:00

The guy who bailed out the big boy banks wants to embrace the Occupy Wall Street movement. Go figure.

Are science and religion incompatible?

2011-10-17T07:00:00.001-04:00

Essays lauding the superiority of science over religion are not uncommon, and Julian Baggini, atheist editor of Philosopher's Magazine, gives us another one in the Guardian. Biologist Jerry Coyne, of course, is much impressed, as he is with any such pronouncement, no matter the quality of them.

Baggini acknowledges that science is focused on how questions, and religion on why questions, but contests the non-overlapping magisteria view of the late Stephen J. Gould--that religion and science deal with two completely different kinds of questions that do not impinge on one another--and correctly so. This is, in fact, one of the places in which the New Atheists are correct: you can't place religion and science in two hermetically sealed compartments and expect them never to get mixed:

This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.

So far, so good. There are claims made by Christianity that are empirically testable: That Christ was born without a human father, lived at a particular time, spent his life in particular place as a member of particular tribe who performed specific miracles, was executed on a particular mountain under the reign of a specific governor of Judea, and was raised after a specified number of days from the dead and seen afterwards by hundreds of people. And that his disciples went around afterwards preaching and baptizing and performing some of the same miracles as Jesus did in His name.

Now you can believe those claims or not, but they are the claims Christianity makes (in fact, its central claims) and they are "scientific" in the broad sense of being explicitly empirical and subject to proof or disproof by the methods of whatever empirical discipline would apply to them, which, in this case, happens to be history. Some are only empirical in theory and are not practically verifiable, but others of them are subject to at least some empirical scrutiny.

There are also philosophical or metaphysical claims made by Christians (but not necessarily by Christianity per se) who are operating in the realm of natural theology that are subject to proof or disproof. Examples of this would be the traditional proofs for the existence of God. These arguments can philosophically prove particular theistic beliefs, such as the existence of God, but if someone were to disprove any one of them, it would not affect the central claims of Christianity itself--it would only prove that some particular Christians (St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc.) were mistaken.

Despite the fact that he is a philosopher, Baggini says nothing about these metaphysical issues which are neither strictly theological nor empirical. In fact, Baggini seems to somewhat confuse the two when he speaks of "an evidence-led, rational examination of a view." A view could be "evidence-led" and not rational, or rational and non "evidence-led." The traditional proofs for the existence of God (or for that matter certain theorems in mathematics) are rational, but not "evidence-led," at least in the sense of being empirically testable.

But the main problem with Baggini's piece is that he seems to see every case in which religion makes an empirical claim as a case in which science and religion are in conflict:

[H]ow easily science and religion can rub on together depends very much on what kind of religion we're talking about. If it is a kind that seeks to explain the hows of the universe, or ends up doing so by stealth, then it is competing with science. In such contests science always wins, hands down, and the only way out is to claim a priority for faith over evidence, or the Bible over the lab.

Coyne too chimes in too, shaking his pom-poms:

This, of course, is just another take on something many of us have long maintained: any theistic religion—that is, one that posits a God who is active in the universe—must perforce make claims that can in principle be empirically examined or tested. And that is a “how” question. On the level ground where science and faith must compete to answer such questions, religion always loses, and always will.

The fact that two approaches may happen to focus on the same subject does not automatically put them into conflict. Conflict only comes when one approach says one thing about it and another approach says something contradictory. If historians say that historical records show that there was a comet in the sky in 627 B.C. and astronomers say there wasn't, that's a conflict. But if they both approaches conclude there was a comet in the sky at that time, then there is not conflict. The two are perfectly compatible.

If science is "incompatible" with theology because they arrive at truth through different methodologies, then science is also incompatible with history, and with ethics--and with philosophy, Baggini's own discipline.

There is really no sense in talking about whether whether science and religion are compatible. If they look at the same alleged fact and come to differing conclusions about it, then so be it. Let it be decided using the methodology that is appropriate.

If the subject is the chemical makeup of something, then apply science. But if it is the existence of God, then science is going to have to bow to philosophy; if it is the genuineness of a historical event, then it's going to have to bow to history; and if it is the nature of the doctrine of justification, then it's going to have to bow to theology.

From the earliest times, Christianity has made empirical claims as evidence of its truth--largely having to do with miracle and prophecy. If scientists like Baggini and Coyne want to dispute them then let them have at it.

But so far they not only don't seem to have refuted them: they're too busy talking about whether magisteria are overlapping to even try.

Occupy the Polls

2011-10-15T19:00:00.001-04:00

CBS reports that 54 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the Occupiers of Wall Street. But if they really represents "the 99 percent," shouldn't 99 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of it?

Just askin'.

The Book of Jake, Chapter XIII, in which Jake waxeth hot concerning the evil thing which Steve Beshear hath done

2011-10-12T07:00:00.005-04:00

Now it came to pass in that day that Steve Beshear, King of the Democrites, spoke unto the people saying, "We shall celebrate this day the writing of the King James Bible, and there shall be an entire month in which the King James Bible shall be celebrated, and there shall be feasting and gladness, and the whole kingdom shall celebrate this thing."

But when these words came unto the ears of Jake, a prince of the Liberalites (a tribe of people allied with the kingdoms of Sodom and Gammorah), he rent his garments and became wroth and sware exceedingly, and made an oath against Steve Beshear, and blogeth against him, saying that the King had done evil in the sight of Jake and that the celebration of the King James Bible was an abomination, and asked, "What crack hast thou smoked, O King, that thou wouldst make such a proclamation, saying 'We shall celebrate this day the writing of the King James Bible?'"

And so Jake called unto him the wise men from among the Liberalites to seek counsel concerning the evil thing which had been done by Steve Beshear, who had spake unto his people saying, "We shall celebrate this day the writing of the King James Bible," saying "Now therefore come, I pray thee, and give me counsel concerning this evil thing which Steve Beshear hath done, so that I may find the words to speak against the king this day so that we may prevent Steve Beshear from bowing down before this abomination."

But finding no wise men from among the Liberalites, the anger of Jake swelled within his breast and so he threw a tantrum, and spake maledictions unto Steve Beshear, saying that the King pandereth unto his people in that day when he hath said "We shall celebrate this day the writing of the King James Bible."

And so Jake foamed at the mouth and cursed Steve Beshear saying that his words had been spoken because he was loved by the Democrites only because he was not David Williams, King of the Republicrites, with whom the Liberalites had made war, and that, in saying "We shall celebrate this day the writing of the King James Bible," Steve Beshear had done greater evil than when he had bowed himself down and made obesience to Ken Ham and had made an alliance with the Hamites and had granted unto the Hamites thousands of shekels from the taxes of the people so that he might build for himself an altar unto the ark, with rides, in a park which the Hamites had resolved to build to worship this thing.

But the words of Jake reached only the ears of the Internites and the Politicites and the Journalites, whom in past times had listened to Jake, but had not hearkened unto his words. And so the King James Bible which Steve Beshear had proclaimed, saying, "We shall celebrate this day the writing of the King James Bible," was celebrated throughout the kingdom with gladness and joy.

Occupying Dartmouth: On tonight's Republican debate

2011-10-11T22:12:00.002-04:00

Several observations about tonight's Republican debate at Dartmouth University:

#1: Herman Cain won the debate--insofar as you can say anyone can be said to win these things. He came off as competent, informed, and articulate. And since the spotlight was on him because of his recent gain in momentum, all of that worked together to solidify him as a first-tier candidate. He is fast erasing doubts about his electoral viability. The fact that he could say that he had two candidates in mind to replace Bernanke when his term as Fed chair ends 2014 (under the implicit assumption that he might be president) and no one was even tempted to chuckle is a sign of where he is in this campaign. And did anyone notice the seating arrangement? Cain was seated in the center, as if he was the man of hour, which he is, given his recent rise in the polls. He looked like a leader. People were looking on him seriously for the first time and what they saw didn't seem implausible. There is a question that every debate answers. The chief question coming into this debate was whether Cain was a serious contender. His performance answered that question in the affirmative. He has at least put himself in the running for the VP spot, where a person of color or a woman is almost a certainty if the winner is a white male, and possibly taken another important step toward becoming the anti-Romney candidate.

#2: Romney came in second--He continues to be the man to beat in this campaign. As always, he comes off as being in command of the issues, particularly economic issues, and forceful in his presentation.

#3: Michelle Bachmann put in another excellent performance. She continues to impress by her almost flawless delivery of every answer to every question in these debates. She answers the questions smoothly and she answers them as an informed, intelligent political leader. It surprises me that, as much as she has exceeded expectations and put the lie to the media stereotype of some kind of crackpot, she doesn't seemed to have benefited in the polls. I don't think this most recent great performance will be enough to reestablish her as a top-tier candidate. Because of her gender, however, and her performance in the debates, she has established herself as a legitimate VP choice, given that the most important thing a VP does is to perform well in about two debates. She would make Biden look silly.

#4: Rick Perry again did not perform particularly well. He is surrounded in these debates by informed articulate people and, partly because he is a latecomer in this race, his reliance on generalities is starting to wear. He announced that he will be announcing an economic plan, but it may be too little, too late. 999 is beginning to seal the show. Perry needed a stellar performance tonight in order to erase the perception that his campaign is lagging. He didn't do that.

#5 Charlie Rose was the best of all the questioners in these debates--largely because he is a professional interviewer and he knows how to ask good, intelligent questions and keep things moving.

#6: Newt put in another superior performance, but his past superior performances have not put in into serious contention and tonight's will be no different in that regard.

#7: Huntsman continued to look good, but despite all the fawning of the liberal media (or perhaps because of it), he will remain the runt in the litter.

#8: Santorum had great things to say, but he has the gravitas of an over-enthusiastic puppy which is one of the reasons people don't see him as presidential.

#9: Ron Paul again had some good things to say. He will continue to be listened to in the debate and possibly do well in several primaries. But nothing particularly remarkable on the Paul front.

#10: This debate, even more so than the other Republican debates continue to impress by the level of discussion between the candidates. The Republicans who keep looking for the Great Right Hope (as in the Christie episode) need to get over it and take a look at what is a great field of candidates, all of whom would make a better president than Obama and who together have contributed to the most substantive and lively set of debates we have ever seen in presidential politics.

Comparing economic plans

2011-10-11T20:49:00.000-04:00

Herman Cain just pitched, once again, his 999 plan at the Republican debate, which involves a 9 percent tax on personal income, a 9 percent business tax, and a 9 percent national sales tax. It occurred to me that Cain's 999 compares favorable to Obama's Plan, which might be called the 666 plan.

What do we want?!!! (We’re not gonna tell!!!) When do we want it?!!! (Now!!!)

2011-10-10T22:00:00.005-04:00

This just in: we now know why it is all of these alienated twentysomethings who are apparently economically comfortable enough to take a week or more off are Occupying our cities! We now go to Matt Labash at the Weekly Standard, who has finally gotten to the bottom of this spreading national tantrum:

They are gathering, they say, to “express a feeling of mass injustice” on behalf of “all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world.” They are against corporations, which have not only taken your houses “through an illegal foreclosure process” and taken “bailouts from taxpayers with impunity,” but also “perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”

Corporations have additionally poisoned the food supply through negligence, profited off the torture of animals, held students hostage with college-loan debts, sold our privacy as a commodity, used the military to prevent freedom of the press, outsourced labor, blocked alternative sources of energy, covered up oil spills, kept people misinformed by controlling the media, created weapons of mass destruction to get government contracts, and perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad while participating in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

My recounting, mind you, does not duplicate their entire list. And even if it did, their entire list keeps its options open with a footnote specifying that “these grievances are not all-inclusive.” So what do they want? Besides, seemingly, to complain a lot about corporations, the very entities that provide so many of the jobs that our economy is sorely in need of? What are they advocating, besides their right to assemble publicly for the purposes of bucket-drumming and eating vegan quiche in the free chow line? Well, according to another posting on OWS’s website, they want a universal single-payer health care system, a guaranteed living wage regardless of employment, free college education, one trillion dollars in infrastructure improvement, to bring the fossil-fuel economy to an end, to outlaw all credit-reporting agencies, and to see immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness for all. This is just a partial list, but they’re also going to be needing unlimited open-borders migration, too, since “these demands will create so many jobs, it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.”

Glad we got that cleared up. Now we we know their reasons for trashing up the city streets and parks and defecating on cars. But OWS's website does not include the agenda of a protester named "Amy," who is seeking "the very abolition of gender." Labash met "her" on the way to the "women's" room.

So now that we know ... uh oh. Hold on. No, it turns out that all of these grievances listed above were just some individual contributor who posted it on OWS's website that are being “hyped by irresponsible news/commentary agencies like Fox News.” There is, says OWS, "NO official list of demands.”

Well, shoot. And we thought we had that figured out.

But this will not stop us, folks. We will find out exactly what this whole thing is about. As soon as they do.

Rebels Without a Clue: Why liberals can't even protest competently

2011-10-10T07:00:00.002-04:00

You know things are getting bad when you start looking back with nostalgia on the Watt's riots, and when anti-war demonstrations, sit-ins, and the burning of draft cards seems like the good old days. Two recent riots underscore the extent to which rabble rousing no longer includes much that can be called "rabble," and is characterized by little that could be portrayed as "rousing."

Riots in the old days were organized in the back rooms of coffee houses or smoke-filled dorm rooms and were always about something: better race relations, the subversion of authority, opposition to the War. At their worst, they were nihilistic. Nihilism is specifically about nothing, which is at least something.

Today's riots? They're broadcast on Facebook and have the feel (and practical danger) of just another lifestyle app: the cultural equivalent of a fashion accessory.

When 60s radical Abbie Hoffman penned Steal This Book, he did it as a protest against the establishment, and he knew his message would be noticed--even if those who read it hadn't paid for the book.

One of the most salient facts about the recent London riots was that the rioters looted all kinds of stores: shoe stores, clothing stores, and computer stores. But they left the book stores untouched. "[B]ooks are losing out to high-end jeans and Apple-made gadgets," said the Economist.

It got so lonely in Waterstone and WH Smith, two British chain bookstores, that one aggrieved employee even dared the rioters to loot his store. "If they steal some books," he said, "they might actually learn something." About, you know, ideas.

You can say one thing for book burning, it sends the message that, whatever form the protest takes, it at least has something to do with ideas.

The protesters of yore could at least muster a real physical threat.. At my alma mater, the University of California at Santa Barbara, we could boast that students in the 70s (the decade in which most of the 60s really happened) had burned down the Bank of America building. It wasn't a particularly constructive demonstration, and it was that much less impressive for the fact that it was performed by a bunch of spoiled teenage children of upper middle class families who wouldn't have known suffering if it had a sign on it.

But they at least had some coherent platitudes they could spout as a reason for burning things down.

The protesters of the 60s questioned authority; made love, not war; tuned in, turned on, dropped out; and Hell no, wouldn't go. What would the London protesters paint on their signs if such an alien thought had struck them? "Give Reeboks a Chance!" "Bring our toys home!" And, had they had Barnes & Noble in London: "Steal this Nook!"

They didn't steal bras in the 60's. They burned them.

The Occupiers of Wall Street can't bring themselves to burn anything. It has been the wimpiest protest in the history of mankind. And ideas? They're not sure what they're problem is, how to solve it, or who is responsible. In fact, some of the protesters seem to be there for purely therapeutic reasons--as a way to deal with their ennui.

"I was too young for the civil rights movement," said one 66 year-old woman. "And during the Vietnam War, I was too serious a student. Now, I just want to stand up and have my voice be heard." For some people, in other words, this is just one big, boisterous encounter group.

The media has made a big deal out of the fact that, for many of the protesters, it was their first time. So maybe that's the problem: a lack of experience. I'm now in favor of federal subsidies for protester training: how to set something on fire; how to formulate a reason to protest; and how to write a proper slogan

The 60s protesters had enough courage of conviction to constitute a palpable threat. The Wall Street protesters, lacking conviction in anything in particular, haven't even managed enough of a legitimate physical threat for police to resort to their riot gear. And the only possible use for tear gas would have been to disburse the crowds of reporters who were trying to figure out why exactly these people were marching.

It is a measure of the ideological seriousness of the protesters that one woman was overheard on a bus saying that she was going to return to a department store from which she had stolen some clothes to exchange them for something else.

The political and philosophical emptiness of the protests in London and Wall Street don't even rise to the level of nihilism. Nihilists are actually dangerous--like the ones in Dostoevsky's The Possessed, a book the London protesters could have burned, if they hadn't been so busy trying on the clothes they were stealing.

In fact, had the London protesters not been standing in line patiently waiting for their turn to steal (no joke--It's apparently a British thing), they could have been down the street at Waterstone Books, where, in the process of looting, they could have taken a few moments to leaf through Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book in which Nietzsche prophesies that, once Western culture has given up on Christianity, it will, in its death throes, produce what he called "The Last Man."

The Last Man is a figure who merely seeks warmth, has no real commitment or passion for anything, is averse to any real risks, and, because he lacks the imagination even to dream, is completely incapable of anything great.

The Last Men of this Seinfeld Revolution can't tell you what they are protesting because they don't know, and the signs they carry don't tell you much, other than that they want the government to do everything for them and that they don't like credit card swipe fees.

Translated, what they mean is they want America to become the North American equivalent of Greece.

These people may be rebels, but they're rebels without a clue.

Why Steve Jobs was significant

2011-10-06T07:00:00.000-04:00

Steve Jobs died yesterday. There has been a lot of talk about his legacy, but his chief contribution to culture was that he produced things no one thought they needed but which ended up becoming indispensable.

RIP.

Pinker vs. Dostoevsky: Is man really getting better?

2011-10-05T00:31:00.000-04:00

Stephen Pinker thinks people are getting better. Morally, that is. Of course, Pinker's own view of morality precludes saying one thing is better then another, except in some indefensible relativist sense.

Pinker makes his case that men are morally better than they were before by getting out the charts and graphs and adding up the numbers--showing we do fewer bad things and more good things now than we used to. There are a lot of questions here, such as how comparable modern statistics are to those collected in prior times--as well as how we will ever know exactly how many murders their were in past societies that didn't have our penchant for adding everything up.

And Pinker addresses this issue like he addresses every other issue: quantitatively. But, of course, that's never the whole story. Here is Dostoevsky's underground man, addressing this issue qualitatively, giving a whole different--and less sanguine--picture of man's moral state (and saying not very nice things about the sophisters and calculators like Pinker):

Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of mankind by means of the pursuit of his own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing ... as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does seem to follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon -- the Great and also the present one. Take North America -- the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein... . And what is it that civilisation softens in us? The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations -- and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more blood-thirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests.

...What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, àpropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers -- such is the nature of man.

Read the rest here.

Trigger Can't Dance: What does it mean to say that humans are rational animals and other animals aren't?

2011-09-29T07:00:00.001-04:00

When I was in junior high school, I had a horse that could count to three. I would say, "Count the three," and she would scrape the ground three times. She could do it for one and two as well. She also nodded her head when she was told to say "Yes," and shook her head for "No." For me it was a chance to impress visitors. For her it involved a carrot.

But Lady Anne was not as smart as Trigger, Roy Rogers horse. Look here Trigger dances, and here he actually acts!

But was Lady Anne really "counting"? And could Trigger really dance? And act? All Lady Anne knew is that if she performed a certain action in response to a certain command, it would result in a carrot. She didn't understand what she was doing. She could clearly distinguish between commands, and which one was calling for which action, but she didn't know anything about the concept "one," or "two" or "three." What Trigger's reward was, I don't know, although it apparently largely involved the emotional reward she got from the relationship with Roy Rogers, who, I heard Dale Evans say once, was an amazing one.

These animals can't reflect on what do, which would involve mentally stepping outside of themselves and viewing as a third person, they just do it.

When Lady Anne scraped the ground with her hoof, she couldn't think about the idea of "scraping the ground with your hoof." She could eat a carrot, but she couldn't think about the idea of "eating a carrot". This involves some kind of abstract conceptual realization that animals do not possess, but that humans, as rational animals, do.

One of the questions that has come up in the comments section of the post on the controversy over Adam and Eve is the nature of the difference between humans and non-humans, and whether animals can conceptualize like humans. The Aristotelian distinction separating man from animal is rationality, and that rationality has been said to consist in some inherent metaphysical ability to conceptualize.

Our beloved Singring, the chief rabble rouser in the Peanut Gallery, claims that primates have the ability to apprehend abstract concepts, but he keeps pointing to instances which do not demonstrate what he claims. He keeps posting links to websites that show or describe apes engaging in certain technical procedures that are clearly clever, but don't give any indication of an ability conceptualize in an abstract way.

So what exactly is the difference between humans and animals in regard to conceptualization? I would submit that man's "rationality" consists in his ability to apprehend universal concepts through process of abstraction (the process by which one intellectually moves from a particular instance of a thing to the concept or idea of the thing), to make judgments about those concepts which are expressed in statements, and to make deductive inferences using those judgments. And animals cannot apprehend universal concepts because they are incapable of abstraction, and they cannot therefore make judgments, because judgments are made up of those concepts which they cannot apprehend, and they cannot make deductive inferences because they are made up of judgments, which they are incapable of making.

For example, a dog might be able to apprehend that his master is feeding him, but he cannot articulate, even his his own mind, "The man (the physical thing in front of me now) is feeding me," since that involves the predication of one concept of another, and he can't apprehend concepts. And he can't think "Man is a rational animal" or "Dogs are mammals." And he can't reflect back on any of these thoughts, viewing them as grammatical procedures, nor can he reflect on the fact that he had these thoughts in the first place.

In other words, animals cannot conceptualize, predicate, judge, or deductively infer. And nothing Singring has said shows he can do any of these things that rational animals are capable of. And this, by the way, is why animals don't have language of the kind humans use.

Oh, and, smart as he is, Trigger can't dance or act either.

More thoughts on the Adam and Eve question

2011-09-27T19:00:00.000-04:00

The responses are, as I anticipated, beginning to come in on my post on the controversy over Adam and Eve, which was spawned by New Atheist biologist Jerry Coyne's claim that "[T]he genetic data show unequivocally that humanity did not descend from a single pair that lived in the genus Homo."

There were several responses from Christian thinkers to this claim, but, as is becoming increasingly common, the most telling came from Catholic philosopher Ed Feser, someone who we have had multiple opportunities on this blog to cheer on. Feser is an Aristotelian Thomist, which just means that he subscribes to the version of Aristotelian philosophy articulated most comprehensively by the medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. As I have said before, Thomas' thought is the only thing worthy to be called Christian philosophy and all other pretenders to that title are weak imitations.

In the present case, Feser has applied the traditional Aristotelian Thomist definition of a "human being," which consists simply of the belief that man is a rational animal. We can explain this by using the terms laid out by Porphyry, a 3rd century Neoplatonist philosopher, in this famous "Porphyrean Tree," a division of all substance.

According to Porphyry, who was simply riffing on what Aristotle had said a few centuries earlier, man, in the most general terms, is an "animal" in the sense that, along with the beasts, he is a sentient, living, material substance. An animal is a living material organism that has senses--unlike plants which are non-sentient living, material substances; and unlike rocks, which are non-living material substances; and unlike angels, which are non-material substances. A man is an animal in this sense, but he has a specific difference that marks him off from the animal (which in traditional logic is called the "specific difference"), which is the quality of rationality itself. This makes him the only being who is a rational sentient, living, material substance.

The Christian belief, based on the Scriptural revelation, is that the human race, consisting of these rational animals, began with two people: Adam and Eve. And we are all descended ultimately from this pair. Genesis says this and the Apostle Paul, whose epistles are an important part of the Divine Revelation, clearly assumes this. In addition, the disobedient actions of this pair caused a spiritual rupture between them and God, and this separated status is shared by all their descendants by virtue of their sharing in the same human nature.

This is the doctrine of original sin. And just as Adam represents the human race in rebelling against God, so Christ represents it on the cross in redeeming it. This, of course, is one of the reasons the doctrine is so important: man is redeemed in the same way he fell: according to a representational scheme: Adam represented man in the fall in the same way Christ represented man in the redemption. Paul states this pretty clearly in Romans. So if you believe Christ redeemed the human race in the act of crucifixion and resurrection, you shouldn't have any problem believing that Adam brought it down in the act of disobedience. They're sort of two sides of the same coin.

A number of scientists (including Christian ones) say that, over the course of the evolution of human beings, there was never just two humans: at the smallest bottleneck of the developmental chain, there were, at minimum, at least 10,000 individuals. Therefore, they say, we are not descended from one primordial pair.

Now there are undoubtedly numerous assumptions along the chain of reasoning that leads to this 10,000 individual estimate. And it is a little suspicious that others use other numbers, which would seem to indicate that this is, in some respect, and inexact science. And obviously there is the evolutionary assumption as well, and there are not a few Christians who won't go for that. But for purposes of addressing the question of whether there was an Adam and Eve whose descendants we are, it really doesn't matter. We can stipulate this for purposes of debate.

One of the interesting things about this debate is that, before Feser weighed in, a number of Christian thinkers, unarmed by the Thomistic distinctions, tried to deal with the implications of the genetic evidence, but, quite frankly, didn't do a very good job of it. Without a proper definition of human being, these people, well-intentioned as I'm sure they were, were in the position of either having to argue against the evidence of genetics on the one hand, or rejecting the traditional account of the Biblical Adam and Eve story on the other. The ones getting the press, of course, took the latter course.

Feser simply pointed out that the term "human being" is not merely a biological designation, but a metaphysical one as well. He is a rational animal--and the "rational" part of that is not a biological designation. Unfortunately, many of the evangelical rationalizations--like that of Fracis Collins--bought into the idea that man is only his biology.

If you don't understand what man is, then your going to have a heck of a time determining who the first one is.

Were Adam and Eve real? Another case of atheist scientists jumping the gun and failing to make important distinctions

2011-09-26T07:00:00.010-04:00

When my youngest son was about eight, he would assault his 16 year old brother by simply rushing him, while my oldest son would calmly put out one arm, catching him by the head and just hold him him there as my youngest son's arms would just flail about in the air, not harming anybody. Undaunted, my eight year old son would simply repeat the same method of attack--getting the same ineffective result. But even though he never got anywhere by doing this, I admired his spunk. He is now 16 himself and trains in mixed martial arts and his technique has improved dramatically.

This is the image that came to mind seeing the most recent exchange between atheist biologist Jerry Coyne (the eight year-old in this saga) and Christian philosopher Edward Feser. Jerry rushes at Ed, all arms flailing, Ed holds hand out, stopping the charge, calmly pointing out to Jerry that his facts are wrong, his arguments are invalid, that he is completely missing the point, or that he has failed to make a crucial distinction, at which point Jerry, in seeming ignorance of the points Ed has made, just keeps repeating the same futile procedure over and over and over again.

But if you can't appreciate his logic (and he makes it very difficult), you at least gotta admire his spunk.

In the most recent episode, the issue is whether there could have been a literal Adam and Eve. It is a debate, Christianity Today magazine asserted, that constitutes "a groundbreaking science-and-Scripture dispute, a 21st-century equivalent of the once disturbing proof that the Earth orbits the sun." While it is not quite equivalent to the issue of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead, a literal claim without which there would literally be no Christianity, the Apostle Paul does clearly assume a literal Adam, making it a truth claim the disproof of which would seriously cripple the philosophical and theological integrity of Christianity, particularly the doctrine of original sin, which asserts that, in the words of the old New England Primer, "In Adam's fall, we fell all."

There are Christians, of course, who try to fudge on this issue, claiming that one could believe in a figurative Adam and Eve (i.e., that Paul was mistaken) and still be an orthodox Christian. Former head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins and his colleague Karl Giberson attempt this position. But it's not a terribly convincing.

The Catholic Church has long taken the position that the origin of the human body--whether it comes from "pre-existent and living matter"--is not the material issue. One can take the position that the human body was the result of biological development as long as one did not deny that "souls are immediately created by God." Leo XII's statement on this issue in his encyclical Humani Generis also states that polygenism (that we are descended from multiple parents rather than one particular set) is not a belief that is reconcilable with orthodox Christianity. In addition, he said, such a belief would conflict with the belief in original sin.

Protestants are not limited by any particular theological authority other than their own personal interpretive inclinations, a fact that has resulted in a riot of diverse schools of thought on such issues, but the Catholic teaching is clear and unambiguous. We are descended from two original human parents. So the questioning of this dogma is important indeed.

Enter Coyne, who declared recently on his blog, "[T]he scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible."

And, lest his assertion was not clear, he added, "Unlike the case of Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, we can dismiss a physical Adam and Eve with near scientific certainty."

And, just in case there was still any doubt about what he meant, he concluded, "[T]he genetic data show unequivocally that humanity did not descend from a single pair that lived in the genus Homo."

Coyne tries to base his claim on genetic research that ironically derives in part from the person whose appointment to head the Human Genome Project he adamantly opposed on the grounds that he was an evangelical Christian: Francis Collins. Collins wrote, in a 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that, as Christianity Today put it, "humans emerged from primate ancestors perhaps 100,000 years ago—long before the apparent Genesis time frame—and originated with a population that numbered something like 10,000, not two individuals."

Richard Ostling, writing in Christianity Today, recounts the position of Dennis R. Venema, a biology chairman at Trinity Western University and a fellow at Biologos, an organization with which Coyne has shown little but scorn because of their "accommodationist" (i.e., that science and religion are consistent approaches to truth):

Over the past decade, researchers have attempted to use the genetic diversity within modern humans to estimate primordial population sizes. According to a consensus drawn from three independent avenues of research, he states, the history of human ancestry involved a population "bottleneck" around 150,000 years ago—and from this tiny group of hominids came everyone living today. But the size of the group was far larger than a lonely couple: it consisted of several thousand individuals at minimum, say the geneticists.

So Coyne, armed with evidence uncovered in part by an evangelical Christian who only several years earlier he proclaimed could not be trusted on such issues--and flailing away, announces that there were no Adam and Eve. Coyne then goes on to catalog various evangelical rationalizations of the problem, all of which he finds wanting, at which point he does his end zone dance.

But it was all effective enough to convince John Farrell to write a piece in Forbes magazine where he unaccountably finds Coyne convincing on this issue, quotes him, and expands on Coyne's points (misstating the Eastern Orthodox view on original sin in the process), and challenging the Catholic Church to renounce its "silence" on the "challenge of genomics."

Apparently the continuous public witness of the Church over the course of centuries to the truth of the Aristotelian-Thomist position, which articulates a full view of man as a physical and spiritual creature that bears only partial resemblance to the being Farrell, Coyne and others discuss in their arguments, and making clear public statements which are easily available to anyone who is serious about wanting to know the Church's position are just not sufficient.

Despite this, Coyne accuses theists "of rationalizing, post facto, hopes and ideas that one pulls out of thin air." Statements like this serve as atheist like a sort of spell to keep .

But just in case anyone needed to be reminded, Catholic philosopher Ed Feser enters the fray. Feser, who is fast becoming the go-to guy when it comes to defending the Ancient Faith against its less than intellectually impressive detractors (and who you can just imagine sighing once again and shaking his head), then pointed out a few uncomfortable facts to Jerry (and John), among which is that, in his post on this issue, Coyne didn't even bother taking into account the view of the Christian institution that has been around the longest, an institution that has made an implicit distinction between the concept of homo sapiens as a biological category and the concept of rational animals as a physical and theological category.

In other words, the biological condition of homo sapiens is a necessary condition for being a humans as we know them now, but it is not sufficient. The philosophical distinction of man as a "rational animal" (Aristotle's definition) is also necessary to the full definition of human being. Men are indeed homo sapiens, biologically speaking. But they are something far more than this: they are creatures who can apprehend abstract concepts in a way in which other animals do not even remotely approximate. He points in his response to an article by Kenneth W. Kemp ("Science, Theology, and Monogenesis"), which goes into gory detail about the Catholic position on this and why it is completely consistence with a bottleneck of however many thousand homo sapiens.

But Coyne, who apparently didn't actually read Feser's article but someone else's summary, does what he seems to do every time he has to deal with Feser: he fires wildly while running for cover. In this case, he criticizes Feser using an argument that Kemp's article, to which Feser had linked to, had already refuted--and then goes and hides behind Jason Rosenhouse. "I needn’t go over all the problems that Jason finds with this."

Yeah. Right.

It's hard work acting as second for someone who, every time he show up for the duel, runs off, but Rosenhouse, a mathematician who blogs at EvolutionBlog, holds forth manfully. But Rosenhouse seems to have no better ability to manage careful distinctions than Coyne.

He argues first that "the Bible does not teach anything remotely like what Feser is describing." Rosenhouse manages this criticism by assuming that Feser is somehow obligated to give Genesis a fundamentalist reading, which it is kind of hard for Feser to do since, like, he's a Catholic. As Feser himself pointed out, while it would be very convenient for atheists if all Christians took a fundamentalist position, they probably need to get used to the fact that all Christians are not fundamentalists, and that it would probably help their case (not to mention make for a more productive discussion) to actually address the arguments of Christians who, like Feser, don't match up with the stereotypes atheists are always invoking.

Rosenhouse then questions Feser's point that human being are not exhausted by their physical attributes, to which Rosenhouse responds, "we should note that Catholic theologians have not the slightest basis for saying that our nature is simply not exhausted by our physical attributes." Back to Feser:

Hear that? Not “a highly controversial basis.” Not “a basis that I, Jason Rosenhouse, find unconvincing.” No, not the slightest basis. Now, forget about my own arguments for the intellect’s immateriality (though Rosenhouse says nothing in response to them). A great many more important Catholic philosophers and theologians have also presented serious arguments for it, as have non-Catholic Christians and pagan thinkers in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Secular writers like Karl Popper and David Chalmers have endorsed forms of dualism. Secular writers like Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Galen Strawson, while they do not embrace dualism, nevertheless reject physicalism. Yet others, like Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, and Joseph Levine, have argued that there are at least serious difficulties facing physicalism which have yet to be answered. And many materialists who think these difficulties can be answered at least acknowledge that the difficulties are indeed serious ones raised by critics in good faith. Then there are secular non-dualists like Tyler Burge, John Searle, and William Lycan, who (as I have noted before) have expressed the opinion that the dominance of materialism in contemporary philosophy of mind owes less to the quality of the arguments in its favor than to ideological thinking.

But for Rosenhouse, it seems, none of these thinkers has the slightest basis for his views. It’s all just transparently feeble religious apologetics, apparently even with the many secularists among them. No doubt that’s because Rosenhouse read a materialist philosophy of mind book once back in college which he thinks “refuted” all the objections to materialism once and for all.

In other words, let's all pretend that these argument have never been made so we can go on arguing with our fundamentalist caricatures.

Finally, Rosenhouse says, "Intelligence and rationality appear to be things that come in degrees." He then goes on to list all the intelligent qualities animals have the men also possess, all of which are apparently supposed to add up to the qualities that men have that animals do not possess, namely, as Feser points out, "conceptual thought" that "can have a determinate, unambiguous content and a universality of reference that sensations, mental imagery, and material symbols cannot have even in principle."

Rosenhouse says that Feser's account "creates some very difficult theological problems." The problem is that none of the "theological problems" Rosenhouse identifies are actually theological problems. In fact, all they amount to is Rosenhouse saying that he doesn't understand why God would have done it that way. So saying you don't understand someone's motivations for doing something some kind of refutation of the fact that they did it?

"Also," Rosenhouse adds, "the idea of a Chosen People is itself theologically problematic. Among Jews, a very common understanding of the notion is that the Jews are unique only in their willingness to accept a covenant with God. Which is to say, it is the Jews who chose God and not the other way around." Wait, Rosenhouse was only just earlier seen arguing that Feser wasn't following the Biblical account, and now Rosenhouse is arguing this? One thing that comes through loud and clear in those accounts is that the covenant is completely unilateral in its initiation. Maybe Rosenhouse could explain how he derives Abraham's willingness out of the Biblical accounts which don't mention what Abraham thought about it at all.

Memo to New Atheists: Don't debate Feser. Go back to your caracatures. And theists? They don't need caricatures. They've got Rosenhouse and Coyne.

At least one thing can travel faster than the speed of light, and it's not KY Gov. Steve Beshear running away from a debate

2011-09-24T13:27:00.000-04:00

Jay Wile wonders: do the results of the recent experiment at CERN on neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light necessarily overturn Einstein's special theory of relativity?

Suppose the results stand up and are confirmed by another lab. Does that mean special relativity is wrong? Not necessarily. Special relativity does not forbid all faster-than-light travel. It only forbids faster-than-light travel for particles with mass that start out traveling under the speed of light. This is because the equations of special relativity indicate it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle with mass through the speed of light. However, if a particle with mass is created with an initial velocity greater than the speed of light, that is not a problem. Indeed, scientists even have a name for such a particle – the tachyon. The particle is hypothetical, of course, but it is consistent with special relativity.

The “neutrinos” being detected are formed in collisions between high-energy protons and stationary carbon atoms. While we think we understand the reaction that produces these neutrinos, it could be that there is something unexpected going on in the reaction, and that effect is causing particles to be produced with an initial velocity that is faster than the speed of light. As a result, the particles being detected aren’t neutrinos at all. Instead, they are some form of tachyon.

In the end, then, this is a very interesting result, but I seriously doubt it will be confirmed. If confirmed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that special relativity is wrong. It could mean that we have finally detected the elusive tachyon! That would be quite amazing, since our current understanding of physics says that we shouldn’t be able to detect tachyons with the OPERA detector. Of course, our current understanding of physics also says that special relativity is inconsistent with neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light.

Read the rest here.

Does E Really Equal MC Squared? The universe just got a whole lot more complicated

2011-09-23T07:00:00.000-04:00

As if it wasn't already.

Scientists at the Geneva-based CERN physics lab have clocked subatomic particles called "neutrinos" going faster than the speed of light, something which, under Einstein's special theory of relativity, is impossible. Says the BBC:

The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and the entirety of modern physics--as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity--depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Says the Atlantic Wire:

Understandably, reports are using adjectives like "baffled" and "astounded" to describe the scientists. "This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully," a theoretical physicist at CERN named John Ellis tells the AP. CERN found that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light, a difference that is statistically significant even with the margin of error. The lab's researchers have checked and rechecked their work and are still asking scientists in the U.S. and Japan to confirm the results. What hangs in the balance? Oh, just the laws of nature and our understanding of the universe.

But we must remember that, even though one of the bedrock theories of physics may now being hanging in the balance, we must not think that the findings of science can be questioned (in the sense of, like, actually questioning them) or that anyone who questions the certainty of these theories is not a blithering ignoramus, which, of course, we know they must be.

Just sayin'.

The death of literature and how to stop it

2011-09-22T19:00:00.004-04:00

If you are not rendered functionally illiterate by being subjected to incompetent reading instruction in American elementary schools and you are not rendered disinterested in books altogether in high school where vocational training and driver's ed are just as high a priority as literature, then you will probably end up in college, where what an author actually says in a book is less important than the ideology you bring to reading it. Here is the Atlantic Wire giving a brief synopsis of the whole mess:

For hundreds of years, people read books for plot, character, action and nice turns-of-phrase. Then, in the 1970s literary theory emerged on American campuses, and suddenly that wing in the English department faculty lounge--the one reserved for the professors whose classes never had a wait list, the ones who knew too much of academia, and too little of life and books--had to tell students they were reading wrong. As The Atlantic's Scott Stossel wrote in 1996, professors at the time were offering up just about "any esoteric ism" you could think of to support reading a book not as a book, but as a coded text (always a text) dealing with the semester's most provocative social issues. Eventually, people graduated and could return to reading books like normal. It was all very silly, and by the end of 20th century, the backlash had begun against criticism "disconnected from life" and academia's "love affair with reducing literature to ideas, to the author's or reader's intention or ideology," argued Lindsay Waters in The Chronicle of Higher Education back in 2005.

Meanwhile, over at the Millions, which another link at the Atlantic Wire brings us to, there is a list of five books to bone up on exactly what is up with literary criticism these days, and give us books about the postmodernist ideologies that rule the higher education roost. But there is little in this list in the way of an actual cure.

I would suggest several books and resources of my own to inoculate yourself against the literary nonsense:

At War with the Word, by R. V. Young: This book is an excellent account of the origins and philosophy behind various kinds of postmodernist literary criticism and champions the (old) New Criticism of Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, Alan Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, and others, who, although their school at times caricatured itself, were largely on target.

From Plato to Postmodernism, by Louis Markos: This is actually a tape/mp3/DVD series put out by The Teaching Company. It is an excellent introduction to the history of literary criticism. Markos points out that Northrop Frye was the last of the logocentric literary critics and after that, it is all been downhill. I have listed to this series several times and look forward to doing so again.

The Meaning of Shakespeare, by Harold Goddard: This collection of commentaries on the plays of Shakespeare is a great work in its own right. I have sought wisdom in it many times and always found it. Published posthumously, Goddard's observations on Shakespeare will give you an insight into the Bard that you can take back to the text like a light to illuminate the mysteries of the greatest writer in English.

All the literary criticism T. S. Eliot ever wrote: Eliot shocked the literary establishment who, after ruling the world of poetry for several decades with poems like" The Wasteland" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," then mostly gave up poetry and began writing literary criticism that was, despite the modernism of his poetic style, highly traditional. This of course was a scandal to the Philistines of the literary world--as good intellectual thinking usually is.

All the literary criticism G. K. Chesterton ever wrote: Chesterton is now getting his due as a Dickens critic. But his literary observations in Heretics, and A Handful of Authors (as well as all the literary criticism that is strewn throughout his other works) is so stunning and insightful, you will need someone to awake you from your exalted state after reading them.

All the literary criticism Alfred Kazin ever wrote: I discovered Kazin when I read his introduction to Moby Dick, one of the greatest pieces of criticism ever written. It's what got me interested in Melville again, for which I am manifestly grateful. Kazin was one of the last traditionalists writing about literature for a popular audience.

All the literary criticism Harold Bloom ever wrote: Bloom is a controversial figure, partly because he attended the birth of the postmodernist literary criticism and partly because he often inserts Fruedianism into his commentary. It also doesn't help that his writings on the Bible assume some of the sillier versions of higher criticism. But that doesn't stop Bloom's work from being among the most cogent and interesting commentary on literature ever written. His books Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, and The Visionary Company, are among the greatest books on books ever written. He may have a number of intellectual quirks, but he is still treats literature like it should be treated.

All the literary criticism Mark Van Doren ever wrote: Mark Van Doren was the father of rather more famous (or infamous son) Charles Van Doren who was implicated in the cheating scandal on the TV game show "Twenty One." That, of course, has little substantively to do with Mark. The elder Van Doren's book Shakespeare is one of the best works of criticism on that great playwright ever written, and his The Noble Voice, a set of ten commentaries on the great epic poems is simply outstanding.

There are other great ones, of course. The older critics are just as relevant today: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and, of course, Samuel Johnson (particularly his various commentary on Shakespeare and his Lives of the Poets). 20th century writers on literature like Hugh Kenner, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More (the two most widely known of the New Humanists), as well as Lionel Trilling, Wayne C. Booth, M. H. Abrams, F. R. Leavis, and H. L. Mencken. Then there are the New Critics like Alan Tate, John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, and Cleanth Brooks. Some of these writers can, however, be hard to read, unlike the ones mentioned in previous paragraphs.

And who can forget George Steiner's Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?; A. C. Bradley's great Shakespearean Tragedy; Northrup Frye's Fearful Symmetry; and C. S. Lewis' essay, "Satan," concerning Milton's Paradise Lost?

Even some of the postmodernists, as many times as they get it wrong, are worth reading. Nietszche's The Birth of Tragedy, Terry Eagleton's After Theory, and the writings of Slovaj Žižek are well worth reading, and postmodernists such as Stanley Fish, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Foucault have insights that you can benefit from as long as you are well grounded in the older, greater critics.

Do yourself a favor and pick up an older edition of Criticism: The Major Statements and Critiques and Essays in Criticism. They are widely available used. Also A Handbook to Literature, by C. Hugh Holman (again, an older edition, unadulterated by the postmodernist plague is better, although there will be less on more contemporary writing--in fact, it's a good idea to have both an older and more recent editions like I have) is the best literary reference ever written.

"Bad, bad Pope," says world media

2011-09-22T07:00:00.001-04:00

Every time a pope makes a widely publicized visit to another part of the world, the media swings into action, talking almost exclusively about the dissident reaction. When John Paul II visited the United States in 1995, it was preceded by headlines about anti-papal protest. When Benedict visited England, there was supposed to be massive demonstrations by atheist groups that would undoubtedly embarrass the Catholic leader.

Instead, of course, the visits were stunning successes, with the respective popes on both occasions surprising their detractors with the unforeseen popularity. John Paul's visit to the U.S. was as successful as such a visit could be, and Benedict's recent visit to England brought out massive crowds just to see him pass by on the streets of London, dwarfing the anemic bands of protesters. Not that you can find much comment about that from the secular media.

Now Benedict is visiting Germany, and, as Tim Drake points out, we're getting the usual pre-visit propaganda:

On the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to his homeland, he’s unable to find any friendly press. The worldwide media is eager to seize on any tension to undermine the trip before it has even begun.

The Chesterton Revival

2011-09-21T12:51:00.000-04:00

When I was writing a master's thesis on G. K. Chesterton's religious thought in the mid 80s, it was hard to find anyone who even knew who he was. Despite little knowledge of Chesterton's actual writing, some did recognize the name, simply because he was still commonly quoted, but beyond that, he was a largely forgotten writer. Since that time, however, there has been a steadily growing familiarity and appreciation of his work.
In a review of a new Chesterton biography by Ian Ker, Jay Parini recounts just how highly Chesterton has been regarded:

Chesterton's work includes nearly every type of writing—poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, biography, political and social argument, playwriting, detective fiction, and Christian apologetics. Yet he was, in the main, a journalist at heart, pumping out weekly columns for a variety of papers, especially The Daily Mail, on every conceivable subject, and his devoted audience included the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, who was "thunderstruck" by Chesterton's fierce independence of thought.

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine fabulist, never failed to mention Chesterton among his favorite writers. Being a fan of detective fiction, he too adored the Father Brown stories, regarding Chesterton, with Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle, as a founding father of the genre. Yet it was more than the detective fiction that interested Borges; he quoted Chesterton extensively as a linguistic philosopher, crediting him with "the most lucid words written about language."

Writers often gravitated toward Chesterton, including George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, both ardent socialists but good, if contentious, friends during his lifetime. Indeed, Chesterton debated Shaw in public on several occasions, and Chesterton's own idiosyncratic but highly suggestive history of the world (The Everlasting Man, 1925) might be considered a riposte to Wells's The Outline of History (1919). (Wells regarded human beings as a species who evolved from a highly primitive form and might one day use their intelligence to establish a peaceful and prosperous world. Chesterton thought that impossible; human beings would continue to suffer from something akin to what Christians call "original sin.") Among later writers, T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien admired him, while W.H. Auden took the trouble to edit a selection from Chesterton's nonfiction in 1970.

Read the rest here.

Who needs to read, anyway?

2011-09-20T13:33:00.000-04:00

The College Board announced last week that this years SAT reading scores were the "lowest on record." In fact, their scores in math and writing also went down. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. pointed out that the problem is that, instead of having students actually, like, read, they are being taught how to do well on tests, with the ironic result that they are doing worse on tests. Pretty soon, people will be so brain dead, they will all become education majors, where grade inflation is apparently worse than in every other academic discipline. Then they will then proceed on into the intellectual wasteland called the "education establishment" where they will implement stupid ideas--like teaching kids how to take reading tests instead of actually having them read.

But the systematic dumbing down of a whole generation of children will have one good result: they won't be able to read the Old Testament, which, unlike university education departments, says David Berlinski, "is the greatest repository of human knowledge and wisdom in the history of civilization, any time, any place." Fortunately, nobody is testing for knowledge and wisdom anymore, so there's no need to worry about it.

And if they could read, then they might venture to read the Times Atlas, where they would be told that that 15 percent of Greenland's permanent ice cover has melted, a figure, the Times says, it got from the NSIDC (which stands for "None Such Is Da Case"), which says that "While mass loss in Greenland is significant, and accelerating, the loss of ice from Greenland is far less than the Times Atlas indicates," giving us another instance of people who overstate the extent of global warming.

And then there's people who won't read. When literary critic Terry Eagleton accused atheist Richard Dawkin's of concocting "vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince,” to which Dawkins responded that he didn't need to read theologians. "To suggest he study theology seems akin to suggesting he study fairies," says the New York Times. “I’ve had perfectly wonderful conversations with Anglican bishops, and I rather suspect if you asked in a candid moment, they’d say they don’t believe in the virgin birth,” he says.

I rather suspect that if you asked in a candid moment, many prominent atheists would say they do believe in the Virgin Birth. You didn't read it here first.

Okay, say Rick Perry can't be bought for $5,000. Can he be bought for $30,000?

2011-09-16T13:37:00.000-04:00

How much money did Rick Perry take from Merck & Co., the makers of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine which, after donating to state legislators and other policy makers all over the country, they went out and pushed to have forced on middle school girls?

But wait! I didn't have the whole story. It turns out it was more like $30,000.

And wait again! Over the past five years, it turns out that Merck gave over $350,000 to the Republican Governors Association, a period in which Perry was heavily involved with the group, and the RGA in turn gave $4 million to Rick Perry.

And wait some more! Merck's lobbyist on the vaccine issue was Mike Toomey, Perry's former chief of staff. Toomey recently co-founded a super PAC that plans to raise over $50 million for Perry's campaign.

The ten books everyone should read

2011-09-15T07:00:00.002-04:00

At his speech at Highlands Latin Schools Community Lecture Series last April, philosopher Peter Kreeft listed the ten books all our classical school teachers should read. It seems to me that everyone should read them. I will note that they were written by two saints (one of whom was a philosopher), two philosophers (one of whom was a saint), four poets (one of whom was also a dramatist), one mathematician (the maximum number allowed), and one novelist. And one author appears twice because he is the greatest: Homer. Here they are:

The Confessions, by St. Augustine
The Summa Theologica, by St. Thomas Aquinas
Plato's Dialogues
Shakespeare's plays
The Divine Comedy, by Dante
The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Aeneid, by Virgil
The Iliad, by Homer
The Odyssey, by Homer
The Pensees, by Pascal
The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky

Are there really 15.1 percent of Americans really living in poverty?

2011-09-14T19:00:00.004-04:00

A multi-millionaire who owns several houses (with servants' quarters), matching his and hers Bentleys, a luxury yacht, and a private jet could find himself listed as "in poverty" in the United States. In fact, Warren Buffet could easily find himself categorized as "in poverty."

How?

Because the United State Census--where all those statistics are coming from telling us that 15.1 percent of Americans are living in poverty--takes account only of income for the year. So if a rich person shows a loss (which is quite common) or has fancy accountants who can reduce his adjusted gross income to below about $22,000 (assuming a family of four), he is counted as poor by the Census.

Go figure.

Logic is human: Literature is angelic

2011-09-14T07:00:00.001-04:00

There is a sense in which literature transcends logic. Logic is limited in its access to truth by the Law of Noncontradiction: Both A and not A cannot be true at the same time and in the same respect. Napoleon was the emperor of France or he was not; water is made of two hydrogen molecules and an oxygen molecule or it is not; It is either a fine day or it is not--in each case, both things cannot be true in the same way.

But poetry (and by that word I mean what it has always traditionally meant--namely, literature in the broad sense) is not limited in this way. Poetry transcends the laws of logic. In a story, something can be something and not be something at the same time. This is the whole power of symbolism and metaphor: one word, or one idea, or one character can be something that it is not--at the same time and in the same respect.

Lewis' Aslan is not Christ, but he is; Tolkien's Galadriel is not Mary (or Eve), but she is; Fitzgerald's Gatsby is not the American dream, yet he is; Melville's Moby Dick is not nature itself, but he is; Steinbeck's Pearl of the World, is not mammon, but it is.

Literature is angelic while logic is human. I had someone challenge me one time about my use in my logic textbook of the Porhyrian Tree, a medieval division of all substance: Everything that exists is a substance; a substance is either immaterial (like an angel) or material. A material substance is either not living (like a rock) or living; a living material substance is either non-sentient (like a plant) or sentient; a sentient, living, material substance is either non-rational (like a beast) or it is rational. Man is the only rational, sentient, living material substance.

But, I was asked, if this classification is correct, then angels are not rational, but we know they are. Therefore, this classification cannot be correct. I pointed out that angels are not, in fact, rational beings. To be "rational" is to have to go through the several step process of deductive reasoning. We are composite (or complex) beings and so we have to go to all the trouble of attaching the minor and major terms together (which constitute a conclusion) by way of a middle term which takes two premises to spell out. This is a lot of trouble, of course, and if you think it's easy, just look at my comboxes on this blog to see how few people are able to do it correctly :).

Angels, however, are not composite beings. They are simple beings. The only beings that can possibly be complex are material beings, matter being necessary for complexity. But angels are immaterial. They are constituted exclusively of form. They are therefore simple. They do not have to go through steps in the process of apprehending truth: it is immediately accessible to them without the necessity of reason. Angels are "intelligent" beings, but they are not "rational" beings, and to call an angel "rational" would therefore be, not a compliment, but an insult.

The person who challenged me on this was a Catholic, and I pointed out that my analysis here was taken directly from St. Thomas Aquinas, the "Doctor" of his own Church.

Logic is human because it requires us to go through a complex set of steps in order for us to find truth, but literature is angelic in the sense that it is simple: it is a direct avenue to the truth. It requires no steps. It makes truth immediately accessible analogically through the literary object which is the thing it symbolizes.

Even though it's not.