The Kentucky Horse Track That Cried Wolf

Well, wouldn't you know it. All that talk from Ellis Park owner Ron Geary about how his race track was going to close if the slots bill wasn't passed. The drop dead date? Labor Day 2009. If the bill didn't pass, there would be no racing at Ellis Park in 2010. The competition from slots-funded tracks across state lines was going to shut him down. He said it to reporters and he said in testimony before the Senate Appropriations and Revenue Committee.

I know because I was sitting behind him at the committee meeting when he said it. And now he's backing off.

And to show how serious he was about making people believe it, he applied for a 5o percent reduction of his race dates, although he didn't advertise the fact that he had left his options open as to whether he could reapply for those dates.

It looked pretty scary.

Then, when the General Assembly refused to be bullied by the scare tactics of the race tracks, Geary began what I have called "the Ron Geary Shuffle." All of a sudden, things weren't as bad as he had thought. At the beginning of July, he began talking about how his track "could remain open" in 2010.

Here is what I said at the time:

First it was that the track was definitely closing if we didn't vote for slots, and now it's a "longshot." Watch Geary slowly creep from "longshot" to "maybe" to "let me consult my horoscope" to "probably will" to actually filing the application for horse racing dates in 2010. I say 2-to-1 he does it. And after all those threats he made to the General Assembly last week that he was definitely shutting down. Mmmm mmm. An industry lobbyist told me that on September 7th, they were closing their doors.

Going into 2010 having not seen what we were told would undoubtedly happen if slots didn't pass isn't going to look real good for the slots lobby.

Well, 2-1 is pretty good odds, but now they are getting better because Geary is now well past the consulting his horoscope phase and is now approaching actually filing for 2o1o race dates. Why?
Couldn't be because Geary and other track owners were engaging in BLATANT EXAGGERATION of the problems they were having and of the need for slots at tracks.

No, no. We must cleanse our minds of this terrible thought.

On July 27, Geary filed for five additional summer race dates, and now, presto, Ellis Park is about to file for dates in 2010:

Apparantly, field and purse sizes have not suffered as much what was feared when slot machines were rejected at Kentucky racetracks. That's when owner Ron Geary declared the track's demise. But now, the Ellis staff is preparing paperwork to apply for race dates, next year.

So it is looking like Ellis Park's scare tactics were just as overblown as their rhetoric about there being 100,000 horse jobs (when, in fact, is was more like about 40,000).

Funny how that works.

The Tortured Logic of the New Atheism

Given the number of comments on this post, I have moved it back up to the top of the blog, where it is scheduled to remain until the end of the week. I will also have some comments on this discussion in another post that should be up today and tomorrow.

From the new issue of The Classical Teacher Magazine

The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once told the story of a cave in the East in which, for many years after the death of Buddha, visitors could still see his shadow:

God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be cast.— And we—we still must vanquish even his shadow!

Nietzsche was wrong about the death of God, but he was realistic about what the rejection of God implied, and he despised those who rejected God but refused to accept the logical implications of that unbelief. He may have been wrong, but at least he was consistent. In particular, he reviled those who rejected Christianity but refused to give up Christian morality. He sarcastically called such people “Englishmen,” because he saw the English of the Victorian period in which he lived as especially guilty of acknowledging the shadow of Christian morality in the wake of the death of the God in whom alone such morality could be justified.

One wonders what choice words Nietzsche would have for the new breed of atheists who now populate the bestseller lists. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great are just several examples of the spate of books by prominent modern atheists, known as the “New Atheists,” that have climbed the bestseller charts with surprising ease over the last two or three years, all of whom purport to reject God, but who nevertheless cling to a form of Christian morality.

Nietzsche is not alone in his assumption that religion and morality are intimately bound together. It has long been assumed by most people that their moral beliefs are dependent upon religious conviction. “If there is no God,” asserts Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamozov, “then everything is possible.” A belief in morality, they think, must be undergirded by a belief in God.

But the New Atheists beg to differ. Morality, they say, has no need of God.

One of the most common problems in argument is agreeing on the question that is really in dispute. There are two ways in which this can be a problem. The first is when the terms are not clear. When we ask whether morality requires a religious foundation, for example, we should be very clear on what we mean by “morality.” Which virtues are we talking about when we ask this question?

There were, in fact, moral beliefs before Christianity came along. There are two kinds of virtue: the cardinal (or classical) virtues: Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Courage; and the theological (or Christian) virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The first four, the cardinal virtues, not only can be sustained without explicit religious belief; they in fact were. They arose in a world, not without religion, but without religions that said much about morality.

The cardinal virtues have also been called the “practical” virtues. They had mostly to do with getting along in life. The most familiar examples of this were Aesop’s Fables. Aesop was reputed to have been a Greek slave in a Roman household, and the ethics in his stories have to do exclusively with the practical virtues. Faith, Hope, and Charity are absent, but the practical virtues, particularly Prudence, are there in abundance. The tortoise knows the virtue of patience and determination and wins his race with the hare; the crane learns that, in serving the wicked, there is no reward; the boy who cries wolf learns that honesty is the best policy.

All these cases involve sheer self-preservation. This is of the essence of pagan morality: it is exclusively self-preservative or at least self-gratifying (and usually applied only to other members of one’s tribe or race). There is nothing wrong with the practical virtues, as long as we acknowledge them to be incomplete. They may be said to be “rational” virtues in the sense that we can identify reasons for practicing them; namely, that they will help us make it through life with less pain and more pleasure.

But there is nothing in Aesop like the parables of the Good Samaritan, or the Lost Sheep, or the Prodigal Son. The theological virtues are completely different from the practical or classical virtues in this: there is literally no practical reason for them. What purely self-preservative reason is there to act selflessly? Why love your neighbor if you can take from him and benefit yourself? Why would any shepherd, looking to benefit himself, lay down his very life for his sheep?

It is theoretically possible for the practical virtues to be rationally justified without a belief in God. But this is not the case with the theological virtues. The theological virtues cannot survive the abandonment of religion. And yet the New Atheists want to say that they can.

The problem with the atheist’s argument is that it confounds these two kinds of morality—the practical and the theological. A case in point is their argument that morality can be explained through a Darwinist view of evolution: morality, they say, has survivability value. Those who are moral are more likely to survive than those who aren’t. Therefore, those who are more moral are morely likely to survive than those who are less moral.

But how can evolution explain why we should treat others with selfless charity? How can evolution explain the survival value of seeing a beaten and half-dead man at the side of the road who cannot possibly do anything for us, and treating his wounds and taking care of him, and then giving two silver coins to the innkeeper and saying, “look after him”? How can this be said to have any survivability value, and what rational reason can we point to that justifies going and doing likewise?

Evolution cannot explain this.

The second problem in trying to determine the question at issue has to do with how the question is stated. The question is whether an atheist can rationally justify moral belief. The question is not whether athiests can be moral. This is a completely different question.

When, in his chapter, “The Roots of Morality: Why are We Good?,” Dawkins argues that morality is the product of evolution, he completely confuses the two questions. His argument is designed to explain why people are good; not why they should be good. It explains the physical cause, but does not provide the logical ground of their (or our) good behavior. It doesn’t provide a rational ground for being good; it only provides a historical explanation (and not a very convincing one) for why, in fact, we sometimes are.

But the process by which an act comes about can tell me nothing about whether or not it was a good or bad act, since bad acts are brought about by a process just like good acts are. I can explain the physical factors leading up to the Holocaust just like I can explain the physical factors leading up to Mother Theresa’s mission to the poor in Calcutta, India. But the chronology of these two events can tell me nothing about why one is bad and the other is good.

The past arrangement of molecules may tell me something about why I feel a certain way, but it tells me nothing about why I should feel a certain way.

New Atheists like Dawkins are either confused themselves about these distinctions, in which case they are not qualified to talk about morality, or they are clear about the distinctions but are counting on their listeners themselves being confused about them, in which case they are being deceptive.

If I am faced with a situation like that of the Good Samaritan, and I see a man lying by the side of the road who needs help, I can get no help from the argument of Dawkins and the neoatheists. Their theory can tell me nothing about whether I should help the man or whether I should simply go on about my business and not trouble myself with helping him. I can do either one and be justified in knowing that my genes have made me do it.

There are only two logical positions a person can hold on the issue of religion and morality. Here is the Christian argument:

If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified
But morality can be justified
Therefore God must exist

Nietzsche and existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre agree to the first, or “major” premise but supply a different second, or “minor” premise, and take the argument in a different logical direction:

If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified
God does not exist
Therefore, morality cannot be justified

Both of these arguments are equally logical: the Christian performs what, in logic is called a modus tollens, which is a way of reasoning negatively backwards; the existentialist performs what, in logic, is called a modus ponens, which is a way of reasoning affirmatively forwards. Both reasoning negatively backwards and reasoning affirmatively forward are logically valid.

The existentialist understands his predicament, which is why existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre rejected Christian morality (and meaning and purpose) outright. They were wrong, but they were intellectually consistent.

The New Athiest, however, tries to deny the obvious. He questions the major premise: “If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified.” He wants to have his philosophical cake and eat it too. But, as we have seen, he can find no competent argument to justify moral beliefs such as charity, but he holds them anyway.

He is an “Englishman.”

The cost of free health care in France

From the Wall Street Journal:

France claims it long ago achieved much of what today's U.S. health-care overhaul is seeking: It covers everyone, and provides what supporters say is high-quality care. But soaring costs are pushing the system into crisis. The result: As Congress fights over whether America should be more like France, the French government is trying to borrow U.S. tactics.

More here.

Rand Paul, U. S. Senate candidate from Kentucky, on Neil Cavuto

Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go: Beware the academic cancer of the "Uncurriculum"

On the decline of Western Civilization at The University of Texas:

The perfecting of the intellect and the formation of character through the attainment of what John Henry Newman called “liberal knowledge” have given way to engorgement with miscellaneous information. The suggestion that higher education should have something to do with acquiring moral wisdom is invariably met with the sophomoric query, “Whose ethics?” As Anthony Kronman has so well documented in his book The End of Education, nothing in the Uncurriculum encourages students to think through the great questions of life in a systematic manner, with the great minds of the Western tradition as their guides and interlocutors.

The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.

Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s own narrow research agenda. Undergraduate education, to which lip service is given, has to survive on the crumbs that fall from the banquet table of so-called “research.”

Read the rest here.

Churchill Downs' share prices up. Will they still be asking for a government bailout?

More on the financial woes of the lucrative horse industry:

The Shares of Louisville-based Churchill Downs Inc. were higher Thursday following the company's announcement the night before of a 5 percent profit increase.

Churchill's stock was up nearly 10 percent, or $3.49 per share, at $38.60 Thursday afternoon.

That was at the end of last week, but shares are still up. We are now taking bets on whether Churchill will continue to call for a government bailout of their increasingly wealthy industry.

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

I have noticed a few fleeting attempts to begin to give Laura Ingalls Wilder the credit she deserves as a great American author.  Although her stories are known as children's stories, they are, more than that, classic pieces of Americana whose style matches their content in simplicity and poignancy.

The New Yorker has an interesting article on Wilder and her daughter rose, with mentions of several books about Wilder that have come out in recent years, as well as an interesting discussion about Rose's contribution to the stories (and her volatile personality). It a little of the snottiness you would expect of the magazine toward "laissez-faire capitalism" at the end, but all in all it is an enlightening article.

Study shows widespread support for school choice, says state group

For Immediate Release
August 4, 2009

"Twice as many Kentuckians support school choice as have confidence in public schools," said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst for The Family Foundation of Kentucky. Cothran's comments came in the wake of a report co-released by The Family Foundation and the Friedman Foundation showing wide public support for school choice.

"The support for letting parents have more control over where to send their children to school is not only significant, it is widespread. The support extends across socio-economic groups, political parties, geographical and demographic groups. When half the people with ties to the public school educational establishment support it, I think you can say that the time for school choice has arrived."

Here are a few important findings of the study:

• About half of respondents prefer private schools for their children
• Slightly more respondents prefer homeschooling as say that the public schools are "good" or "excellent".
• Slightly over half support school vouchers.
• 44% of respondents think current school spending is too high, and only 9 percent think lack of funding is the biggest problem with public schools.
• Only 14 percent think parents have the greatest influence on their public school system.
• More people would be likely to vote for a candidate who supports school choice than would vote for a candidate because he or she is against it.
• Half of those with ties to teachers unions support school vouchers

"Kentucky has historically shied away from school choice, but this study clearly shows that there is widespread support for this idea," said Cothran.

###

John Stossel on Canadian Health Care

HT: The Weekly Standard

Busing the planet into oblivion

The Jefferson County School District is continuing its efforts to get around the U. S. Supreme Court decision striking down their forced busing plan. And three parents are suing the district to, like, make them do the right thing.

Here's Richard Innes at the Bluegrass Policy Blog:

One of the three parents suing the district was told his child would be forced to travel about 20 miles away to the Shelby Elementary school instead of the local area school.

Now, that is really curious.

According to the “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, Adequate Yearly Progress, 2008 School and District Results, August 5, 2008 Release” Shelby Elementary School is in Tier 3 status under No Child Left Behind. That means as of the summer of 2008 this school had failed to make adequate yearly progress for four years in a row.

Quite important to the current discussion, parents of students already in that school had to be offered the right to transfer their students out to better performing schools.

Now, along comes the school district, and without blinking an eye, it requires the five-year old in question – to be bused IN to this school from all the way across town – and the parent can’t say NO!

So now we're force busing kids all the way across town to demonstrably bad schools. This is what social engineering has come to: pursuing Diversity even if it's not good for people.

There may be only one way to stop Jefferson County school officials from their forced busing madness: find some other dogma at least as important as Diversity. And I've got just the thing: What is the carbon footprint from all this busing to bad schools?

Customer service at the new Government Motors

Mary Katherine Ham at the Worldwide Standard:

I wanted a Chevy Camaro.

I'd never really liked American sports cars before. But the 2010 Camaro -- a revival Chevrolet has been talking up since 2006 -- is so much more sleek than your typical muscle car. And since my BMW 330 started showing its age (nine) around the same time that the death of the U.S. auto industry hit the headlines, I thought: Why not do a little something to help?

So, after seeing a newspaper ad promoting Camaros at a local Chevy dealer, I called and left a voicemail saying I was interested in a test drive.

I never heard back...

It doesn't end there. Read the rest here.

First Lesson in How to Become a Human Being: The Best Children's Books of All Time

There is a knock down, drag out debate on the worst children's books ever over at the Guardian, and the author of the post gives the award to Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree and The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg.

My own nomination is The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. There is nothing wrong with the content of this book--and likewise nothing remarkable about it. The problem is with how it is written. I think the problem is that there are some books whose reputation is based, not on the book's quality, but on its place in the history of children's literature. The Five Little Peppers, is, I think, one of these. I tried to read it to my kids once and just had to put it down because you just couldn't read it out loud, the prose was so bad. It is notable only for position as one of the first books written with children in mind. The same is the case with Charles Kingley's Water Babies, and equally atrocious book that is remarkable only for the author's literary pioneering spirit.

But I would like to put the emphasis on the positive here. What are the best children's books? Here's my list of books (in order of reading age) that we have read over and over as a family, and which never get old:

• Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown. We read this to our children when they were very young before they went to bed. There was something comforting and peaceful about the old woman, and the comb, and the brush, and the bowl full of mush. And what fun we had trying to find the mouse on every page.
• Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss wrote nonsense, the value of which, I think, is that it turns the world upside down so that you can see the wonder of it anew. This, along with Dr. Seuss's other books (with the possible exception of the Cat in the Hat), create a whole Seussian world which provides a comment on this one. For an excellent explication of the value of nonsense literature, read Chesterton's great essay, "On Nonsense."
• Are You my Mother?, by P. D. Eastman. I am willing to admit that this one may be the one book on this list without universal appeal, and is possibly meaningful to me because it captured me when I was a child. But when my wife is not feeling as accommodating as she normally is, and a child complains that he is not getting his way, my wife will stand straight up and say, "I am not your mother, I am a snort!" And that seems to work pretty well.
• Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling captured the mythological spirit in these jataka tales. "How the Elephant Got is Trunk," was a continued delight to our children. These are stories that feed the imagination.
• Betsy-Tacy, by Maud Hart Lovelace. These stories take the reader back to the life of the kind of small town that used to be common in this country and that, I am afraid is almost extinct. The prose is that magical writing that evokes the poetry of simplicity. Don't miss Betsy's hysterical attempt to make "everything stew."
• Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (as well as most of the other books in the Little House series). Wilder will go down as one of the great American authors. Mark Van Doren once said that the job of the poet is to name things. In this sense the Little House books are pure poetry. Somehow she manages to bring the seemingly mundane things of daily existence into life.
• Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White. This book, as well as Trumpet of the Swan (I didn't like Stuart Little as well) are, again, magical books. E. B. White was one of the great prose craftsmen, and these are his best writings.
• The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes. Don't be fooled by the Newbery Award Estes received for Ginger Pye, which wasn't particularly good. The Newbery Committee did this because it felt guilty for not giving Estes the award for the earlier Moffats books, which include The Middle Moffat, and Rufas M. These books magically transport you back to the life of a quintessential American small town. Oh, and they are illustrated by the inimitable Louis Slobodkin, one of the great children's illustrators.
• The Jack Tales, by Richard Chase. This and Chase's Grandfather Tales are retellings of the European fairy tales after having been filtered through the mountain imaginations of generations of Appalachian story tellers. The clever Jack defeats all enemies, and does so without breaking a sweat. If you've ever had any contact with mountain politicians, you'll recognize the cleverness that is valued in the mountains.
• The Good Master, by Kate Seredy. This and The Singing Tree are stories of a family living in the Balkans during World War I. They are magical stories of a patriarch who watches over those--his family and those under his charge--as a war rages around them. There is nothing here of the modern obsession with everyone being equal. The good master is not equal, he's just good, and those around him thrive on his goodness.
• The Winged Watchman, by Hilda von Stockum. Hilda von Stockum wrote a number of books, including two series, the first, The Mitchells, and the second, the Pegeen books. They are all wonderful. And they take place, as did her life, in three different parts of the world. This takes place in Holland, the Mitchells in Canada, and the Pegeen books in Ireland. von Stockum captures the uniqueness of each place.
• Penrod, by Booth Tarkington. An Indiana version of Tom Sawyer, and at least as good. Penrod is a boy who is having trouble figuring out the rules of the adult world, and the adults are having trouble figuring out why Penrod can't figure them out. Tarkington, one of the great and under appreciated American writers, penned this rumination on boyhood in the early 20th century, and produced one of the funniest books ever written. Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, this is a book about a "bad" boy (really, an ignorant boy). And, like all such books, it helps your own "bad" boy at home see himself in the third person. He sees how silly he is by seeing how Tom and Huck and Penrod look to the outside observer.
• Papa's Wife, by Thyra Ferre Bjorn. Papa's Wife is an thoroughly and explicitly Christian book. It is about a woman who is the maid of a Swedish minister in Lapland, who then moves to the United States, and eventually marries the minister who joins her in the U.S. Their life together with their children is an endearing and wonderful story.
• Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt. If you could drink of the Fountain of Youth, would you? We never think of what it would do to the meaning of life if it didn't have an end. A young girl discovers a fountain in a wood near her house that a group of traveling people have already discovered. She meets them, and the boy, about her age tries to convince her to drink with him so they can be 17 years old together forever. But she refuses. The final scene, when the boy, many years later (and still 17) travel back through town and visits the graveyard, is a devastatingly poignant moment that puts life in perspective in a way few other things do.
• Ann of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery. I was introduced to these stories through the excellent PBS television retellings. But as good as the television movies were, the books are even better. A young red-headed arrives in a Canadian village to meet her adopted family, an old maid her brother. Despite her precociousness, she quickly endears herself to her stuffy new family. A bit like the also excellent Pollyanna.
• The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. What can you say about Tolkien? One of the few authors who is able to create a world that seeming has been there forever. The Lord of the Rings, one of the greatest books ever written is, of course, better. But this book is the introduction to Middle Earth. An old fashioned dragon story that will also serve as a great way to help children understand Beowulf when they read it later in life.
• The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling had a mythic sense that comes out clearly in these books. Those who were introduced to the Jungle Book through the Disney movie will have to simply erase their memory banks and start over. The book is nothing like the movie. They are serious investigations into the meaning of life and the nature of humanity. Kipling's world is a place where "the Law of the Jungle and the sea are your only teachers" (to quote Dylan). Kipling has an Old Testament sense that pervades the books from "The Water Truce" to the "The Elephant Dance." I have a hard time with books in which there are talking animals, but Kipling's is one of the few (along with the excellent The Wind and the Willows) that pull this off by portraying the particular kinds of animals as the kind of people they really would be if they had human characteristics. Baloo is what a bear would be if her were human. And everyone has met the Bandar-Log somewhere on the road of life.
• The Old Squire's Farm, by C. A. Stephens. An old Maine farmer and his wife lose their three sons in the Civil War, and all the children come to live. These stories, published in the Youth's Companion in the 1800s, are true stories of the author's life growing up with the Old Squire and his wife in 19th century New England. They are among the most moving, funny, interesting, and compelling stories you will ever read. The final story, in which the children, all grown and moved away, come back home to decide who must stay with their now lonely grandparents in their last days will bring tears to your eyes. The sequel, Sailing on the Ice, is equally as good.
• Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle. Every boy should read this book. It is the coming of age story of a young nobleman whose father has been disgraced and who has been sent to the castle of a man who, unbeknownst to the boy, is a friend of his father's who is watching him become a man. The boy makes his way from a page to a squire to a knight, and does so by rebelling against the fagging system in the House similar to that which later pervaded the British public school system. He eventually avenges his father in a final fight scene that is one of the best action sequences in literature.

When I come to write my book, How to Become a Human Being, I will include a chapter on these books. This is what it's about folks.