Let's NOT Debate Science

Via Glenn Reynolds and John Tierney comes an idea whose time should never come: a debate by a bunch of politicians about science. Yes. I am a scientist and I have an intense interest in political philosophy.

And yes, needless to say, I have very strong opinions about several issues in the public policy debate that many would claim require at least a better-than-layman's command of scientific or technological matters. Off the top of my head, global warming, creationism, and the medical insurance crisis come to mind.

Regular readers of my blog will not find my opinion on this matter a surprise, but with a web site and several scientists (and science writers) I respect signing on, now strikes me as an excellent moment to reiterate them.

The government should have nothing whatsoever to do with science outside of protecting the intellectual freedom and intellectual property of scientists, engineers, other innovators, and their financial backers. Since protecting these freedoms -- derived from the fundamental individual rights of the scientists themselves -- requires our nation to be able to protect its scientists from harm, the government not only can but ought to prevent certain militarily valuable discoveries from falling into enemy hands.

Beyond that, some small amount of funding for military research by our government is appropriate, but no more. And yes, this means that I think that the government ought not be involved in the vast majority of the research funding it currently engages in. If scientists have individual rights that ought to be protected (and we do), so does everyone else. As a scientist -- indeed, as a human being -- I have no right to one red cent of loot expropriated from someone else. All scientific funding should be given voluntarily to scientists or not at all.

The government is the only social entity which can and should wield force -- the delegated retaliatory force we all have the right to use to defend ourselves from the initiation of force by others -- and the government exists to wield that force for one reason and one reason only: the protection of the individual rights of its citizens.

It follows, then, that the government should use scientific knowledge for only one purpose: to protect the rights of its citizens as well as possible. For example, the government would use applied science to protect its citizens through such means as superior weaponry against foreign threats, better forensic techniques against domestic threats, and superior methods of measurement to resolve honest disputes or to determine whether some act by a citizen poses an objective threat to another.

If you recall my off-the-cuff list early on, you will note that in light of what I have just said, only perhaps global warming would merit any special scientific study by a political candidate. (More on that shortly.) The government should leave education and medicine entirely in private hands for the same reason it should not fund scientific research: Namely, doing so requires the taking of money belonging to private citizens by force, in violation of their individual rights. (And not even that high a level of government involvement in a sector of the economy violates more than just property rights, as Linn Zinser and Paul Hsieh recently argued in the case of medicine.)

I regard evolution as an induced fact and Western medicine as second to none. But please, please give me any day a politician who isn't so sure about evolution and who goes for a folk remedy or two -- but whose convictions and public record indicate an unwavering understanding of and loyalty to individual rights -- over a Nobel laureate in medicine who thinks socialism is the ideal political system. As for global warming, the only issues that need concern the government are whether human activities pose an objective threat to other human beings through such a mechanism and, if so, what ought to be done.

Thanks to our mixed economy and its source, the widespread lack of appreciation for the concept of individual rights, our political debate has repeatedly taken on the following form. (1) A government-funded scientist claims that mankind may be in danger from a calamity caused by the hot scientific topic of the day, like global warming. (2) Because the government is believed to exist to nurture us (rather than protect our right to pursue our own welfare), some government scheme is concocted to "protect" us from the new "threat". These schemes must necessarily involve the violation, in some way, of our individual rights as they curtail one activity or another of ours that does not pose an indisputable threat to the lives of others. Economy-wide fuel rations (with euphemistic names like "carbon caps") are an example. (3) Other scientists argue pro and con. (4) Nobody disputes the propriety of government intervention in controversial cases, so what should be a political debate about whether the government ought to be telling us, say, what fuel to use, becomes a free-for-all of unqualified laymen wrangling endlessly about an issue that the scientists who aren't just angling for more state funding from sympathetic politicians haven't settled.

Let us say for the sake of argument that someone shows conclusively -- on the level that thallium is known to be poisonous -- that global warming is due to human activities and will cause the oceans to rise fifty feet over the next century, by any reasonable prediction based on current trends. The average man will, by such a point, be able to grasp this fact, and a politician who doesn't will be about as hard-pressed to get elected as a flat-earther.

What should be going on in all of these "scientific" political debates -- in which all sides agree that the state owes us all a living -- is, instead of a perseveration on scientific and technological minutiae, a debate about how the state can best protect the rights of all individuals.

Were we to work on removing the apparatus of the state from education, a Mike Huckabee could spout creationist nonsense all he wanted, but he'd have no way to subject our children to it. Were we to insist on all patients making their own financial arrangements for their own medical care, how much lung cancer costs taxpayers would be off the table entirely. And were we not rushing headlong into imposing a draconian set of immoral and impractical government controls over our economy, we would realize that the scientific debate over global warming and the political debate on what (if anything) to do about it are two entirely different things.

Having our politicians hold a debate on science is a harebrained idea because it distracts us all from the real problem, which is that politicians (and the general public) do not have a firm grasp of the nature of individual rights or of the proper role of government or, therefore, of the actual role of science in government.

-- CAV

Annual Hiatus

Each year, I take a week off from blogging around Christmas. The holidays, always hectic are especially so this year, to the point that I find myself having to stay up all night to get everything accomplished that I want. On top of that, I am hard-pressed even to write this perfunctory note. I am leaving a couple of things for later that I'd wanted to tackle now....

Annual Report

It has become my tradition to take a snapshot of my blog's statistics about this time of the year, so I will do that now:

statistic	2004	2005	2006	2007
visits/month (1)	130	2,973	4,125	6,786
technorati rank	780,679	43,294	37,607	142,914
TTLB rank	14,889	5,363	4,546	4,262
TTLB creature	wiggly worm	crawly amphibian	flappy bird	marauding marsupial
blogshares valuation (B$)	1,000.00	25,586.63	45,959.95	48,050.26

(1) This is sitemeter's automatic projection for the month based on visits in the past week.

All rankings based on incoming links (Technorati, the TTLB Ecosystem, and Blogshares) have been a little squirrelly all year. I expected to see these dip a little since I haven't had the time to do as much out-linking as I used to (and out-linking often gets reciprocated), and yet the Technorati rank plunged, as had the TTLB rank until just recently. (When I was a contestant in the 2007 Weblog Awards, I was but a slithering reptile.) I wonder whether each service tweaked its ranking algorithm at some point. A few other blogs I pay attention to seemed to track lower with this one.

A more reliable statistic has been site visits, which don't necessarily track with inbound links. Those have been slowly rising, and since people (and not inbound links) read blogs, this means that the blog is being read more.

Of course, all this talk about site statistics is mere prattling when considered in light of (1) all the support it got during the Weblog Awards, and (2) the fact that it is becoming commonplace for a post to start a good discussion among the visitors. Not only is this blog being read, it is causing its readers to think, and that just happens to be an important part of why I write. That is gratifying.

I thank my readers for your support over the past few years.

Couple of Plugs

I would be remiss not to remind my readers of the existence of two great values I have discovered through blogging, or to urge them to consider trying these things for themselves or consider giving them as gifts.

I am speaking, of course, about Craig Biddle's pro-reason, pro-individual rights quarterly journal of culture and politics, The Objective Standard, and Scott Powell's fascinating First History courses for adults.

And remember, readers of this blog can (until Christmas) get a discount for the Powell History courses by signing up for the holiday specials and saying (via email to powellhistory@powellhistory.com) I sent you.

Season's Greetings!

I won't be around here much, if at all for the next week, so let me wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year now -- although I will probably be back by New Year's Day.

-- CAV

Why Be Well-Informed?

Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy considers the interesting question of how the ignorance of the electorate might affect poll results. Somin cites some pretty staggering data and has some interesting thoughts of his own on the subject, which he elaborates upon in an academic paper. The level of ignorance of the average voter, even setting aside public policy minutiae, is certainly appalling.

Arguing that judicial review reduces what he calls the "information burden" of voters, Somin cites a difficulty posed by the enormous size of today's welfare state:

Obviously, the problems caused by the combination of a large and complex government and severely limited public knowledge of and attention to its activities cannot be solved by judicial review, nor should the judiciary even attempt a comprehensive solution. However, judicial review can sometimes alleviate the problem by limiting the scope of government activity. For example, if judicial review blocks government from undertaking content-based restriction of speech or from intervening in the internal affairs of religious groups, this means that voters need not devote time and effort to learning about government activities in these areas and can focus their severely limited attention on other issues. At least at the margin, the information burden on voters has been reduced, and their ability to pay adequate attention to the remaining functions of government increased.

... To take an extreme case, the information burden on voters would be vastly reduced and their ability to control remaining functions of government would be vastly increased in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court were to adopt Richard Epstein's position that most post-New Deal economic legislation is unconstitutional.

Although I would not hold that a favorable court ruling is necessarily cause for ignoring the government activities in question, this is an interesting idea which is true in one respect, but false in another.

It is true in the sense that if the state is going to attempt to run the economy (and be held accountable by the people), that the government (and hence the people) would have to be near-omniscient, because the government is attempting to do the economic planning of all individuals rather than allowing them to do so for themselves. Andrew Bernstein once quoted George Reisman on that score in The Capitalist Manifesto:

The overwhelming majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and planning about their economic activities that they perform in their capacity as individuals actually is economic planning. By the same token, the term "planning" has been reserved for the feeble efforts of a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions, and to call that planning. (345) [bold added]

In short, to the extent that the government runs the economy, the information required of voters to have it run the economy properly is so enormous as to make that impossible. That early American saying, "Mind your own business," is revealed to be quite wise.

And the problem lies not just in economic affairs. Consider the ongoing debate about the so-called Global War on Terror, which is a needlessly complicated amalgam of military action, foreign aid, and appeasement. Even the binary choice between John Kerry and George Bush was complicated by the fact that while one was pacifist by inclination (but would be under public pressure to do something militarily), the other claimed to be pro-war, but had adopted a policy quite different from that employed by the United States when it fought the Japanese theocracy in World War II.

In the delimited sense that when government takes on tasks it has no business being involved in, choosing between candidates becomes more complicated than it ought to be, Somin is correct. But past a certain point, the value of more information diminishes.

For example, consider one issue listed on the poll posted at Volokh Conspiracy: Education. The state should get itself out of the business of education, and yet there will be no serious proposal to do so in any election any time soon. The various candidates will most likely offer proposals that differ only in unimportant ways. One will do well simply to make sure there is nothing horrendous, like a mandate that Creationism be taught in the public schools, then data dump the remaining minutiae. At the end of the day, the chance of substantially improving freedom in the field of education in the next election is nil, and time spent studying up on, say how much Mike Huckabee or Barack Obama want to throw down the rathole of public education is wasted.

So I suspect that I disagree with Somin on one thing: Being a "well-informed" voter -- at least in terms of the concrete details of every position in every political debate -- is is not inherently a good thing. Knowing what the proper role of government is, and thereby knowing which public debates aren't a complete waste of time is infinitely better -- although at the current level of agreement on all sides that education must be publicly funded, knowing that it should not be will not help one achieve his ends by voting.

And with that last sentence we begin to get to the heart of the matter. Substantive debate does not happen only during elections if it happens during elections at all. If one wishes to achieve lasting, meaningful change in politics, he needs more than one vote cast between two unacceptable choices. He needs others to be predisposed to vote as he does -- enough others that politicians notice the demand for a pro-freedom position on any given issue. As a genuine appreciation of freedom requires one to understand the nature of individual rights as the freedom of all in a society to act in accordance with their own best judgement, this means that to start having elections that don't require near-omniscience to make almost meaningless choices, those who appreciate freedom must work towards a more rational culture.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 285

Land of Edison Bans the Light Bulb

Hardly a day passes any more that I don't regret my vote (HT: Paul Hsieh) in 2004.

A little-noticed provision of the energy bill, which is expected to become law [It already has. --ed], phases out the 125-year-old bulb in the next four to 12 years in favor of a new generation of energy-efficient lights that will cost consumers more but return their investment in a few months.

Or see that I was right about Bush in 2000.


So instead of electing a man who would stand up to global warming hysteria, we have gotten Al Gore's errand-boy. The above cartoon would have been prophetic had it shown George Bush taking away the light bulb, perhaps with Al Gore controlling him by strings.

[Update: Paul Hsieh has more over at Noodle Food.]

Blog Obscurity

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, vice president for marketing for Technorati, Derek Gordon, passes along lots of interesting facts about blogs, including the following note on blog obscurity:

Q Any idea how many of the 109.2 million blogs you track get no hits in the course of a year?

A Just over 99 percent. The vast majority of blogs exist in a state of total or near-total obscurity. [bold added]

Who knew that the bar for being in the top 1% of blog readership was so low? (HT: Adrian Hester)

Another Reason to Oppose the Reverend Mike Huckabee

His campaign recently called the War We Ought to Have Won Already but Haven't Started Fighting Yet a "Theological War". Spake campaign manager Bob Vander Plaats:

... I think Governor Huckabee has a lot of resources that he goes to on national security matters. Here's a guy, a former pastor, who understands a theological nature of this war as we're fighting a radical religion in Islam. I think he's most prepared to lead this country in that dynamic. But he has a definitely a seasoned tenure of people advising him on foreign relation matters.

... [T]he war on terror is obviously ... a theological war. We have a radical Islamic group, so we believe that a guy with the training of a pastor understands the theological nature of the war. That also makes him very well-prepared in regards to this war on terror.

Insofar as this war is "theological", it is for the Moslem side, against a fundamentally secular civilization. This is something the Reverend Huckabee has repeatedly shown that he does not understand.

There are two ways to lose this war. Aside from capitulating to the Moslem side, we can reject the rational foundations of our own civilization. The only difference -- and it would not be an important one -- would be: Which brand of superstition will call itself the victor?

This is what Huckabee understands.

The enemy of one's enemy is not necessarily one's friend.

Landover Baptist on The Golden Compass

This is good for a chuckle or two. Commenting on how The Golden Compass "teaches children that bears can talk", a point-by-point dissection of the movie states that:

The Bible makes it factually clear to children that only snakes and donkeys can talk. "Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" Genesis 3:1 "And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee?" Numbers 22:30

This would be a lot funnier if someone who would probably agree with much of this satirical review weren't a serious presidential candidate.

Good News for Isaac Schrodinger!

Those of you who helped him last year will be delighted to learn that he is now a permanent resident of Canada!

This won't be just a joke for long!

Taking on trends I have noted here, such as drinking heavily-sugared coffee made from over-roasted beans and wearing pajamas in public, Johnny Virgil of 15 Minute Lunch comes up with something that is going to be attempted sooner or later, if it isn't being done already:

[H]ere's an example: Say you're a drummer who just broke up with your girlfriend. If that's not the definition of homeless I don't know what is. The first thing you should do is buy a laptop like this one. Then hit the garbage can outside your local Starbucks and grab an empty cup. After that, you're on easy street. Walk in, sit down, open the laptop, put your feet up and bask in the coffee-scented goodness that is your new living room.

And I love the heading this guy uses for his comments: "X drops of water in an ocean of compromise". (HT: Adrian Hester)

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Minor edits. (2) New link to Noodle Food.

Dropping Context

Robert Spencer opens a column about an "honor" killing in Canada at FrontPage Magazine by documenting several superhuman feats of context-dropping:

Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old; her father has been charged with strangling her to death because she refused to wear the hijab. Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, declared: "The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to colour or creed." Sheikh Alaa El-Sayyed, imam of the Islamic Society of North America in Mississauga, Ontario, agreed: "The bottom line is, it's a domestic violence issue." Nor was this denial limited only to Muslims. Lorne Gunter said in the Edmonton Journal: "I see nothing uniquely Muslim in her death. If, indeed, her father killed her, her death is his doing, not Islam's." [bold added, links omitted]

All of these people are correct that this was a case of domestic violence, but wrong to imply that identifying it as such closes the case. This is a homicide and an important part of solving such a case involves identifying any possible motives of the killer. That Islam might be important here is so obvious that the three commentators here could not possibly be missing the point by accident.

Robert Spencer understands this, and lays out how Islam predisposed this young woman's father to kill her. But he also understands what it means that so many seem -- fellow Moslem to the father, and leftist alike -- so content to hang him while ignoring crucial evidence.

[T]hink for a minute about what Muslim spokesmen in Canada could be saying. They could acknowledge that the divine sanction given to the beating of disobedient women by Qur'an 4:34 has created a culture in which such abuse is accepted as normal. They could call for a searching reevaluation of the meaning and continued relevance of that verse and other traditional material that reinforces it, and call in no uncertain terms for Muslims to reject definitively its literal meaning, now and for all time to come. They could acknowledge the prevalence of honor killing in Islamic culture, which has no sanction as such in Islamic theology but nonetheless enjoys enough Islamic approval that the Jordanian Parliament a few years ago rejected on Islamic grounds attempts to stiffen penalties for it. They could call for sweeping reform and reexamination of the status of women in Islam.

For any of this to happen, Muslim leaders in Canada would have to adopt an unfamiliar and uncharacteristic stance of self-criticism, and Canadian leaders would have to abandon their ongoing infatuation with multiculturalism. [link omitted, bold added]

Ideas cannot kill unless acted upon, but in the sense that they can guide actions, one can liken them to parties to a murder, and see that as possible motives, they can, in a sense, go on trial. To see a bunch of Moslems and multiculturalists so eager to comply with Western law is rather odd -- until one realizes that by doing so, they hope to stop the investigation of a murder before it becomes apparent that in the sense I just indicated, Islam is one of the killers, and multiculturalism an accomplice.

To refuse to demand a full explanation of the father's motives here is not merely unjust. It is to sanction the murder of this girl by letting evil ideas go unevaluated by others who hold them and may later act upon them.

-- CAV

Slow Roundup 2

1. When I go to work, I park my car at a lot several blocks away and take a shuttle bus to my building. Recently at the bus stop, I overheard a woman claiming matter-of-factly over a cell phone that "The Holy Spirit was talking to me." Nah. That was just the wind of superstition howling at the last few flames of the Enlightenment.

2. Have you ever noticed that self-sacrifice is the ideal of altruism, and yet it is not called "human self-sacrifice"? That would be redundant, but it would also be a helpful reminder of what we are being asked to do. Put this another way, why is it that human sacrifice is always wrong -- unless the victim commits the act himself? But these are all things that if we thought about them too much, we might not do the dirty work ourselves....

3. My brothers are very funny. Once, one of them out of the blue asked the other, "You know what's good about cat meat?" The other had no answer. So the first one continued, "It's free."

4. Ann Coulter, when she attempts to pretend that there is no such thing as a "religious right", will sometimes cite hit counts from Lexis-Nexis searches for "religious right" in left-wing media reports. I wonder what a similar search of "secular left" among her own writings (or those of other conservatives) would yield. As I have pointed out here before, "secular" and "leftist" do not mean the same thing, but conservatives are working overtime to make you think they do.

5. As a child, I knew adults who would say things like "It done tumped over," meaning "It fell over." These are the same type of people who will refer to a suit -- any suit -- as a "monkey suit".

6. I never claimed I wasn't weird! Two of my favorite smells are diesel exhaust and dead skunk. I got both the morning before Thanksgiving when I took the tram downtown to pick up our rental car.

7. There is a difference between collecting for charity and attempting to expand the welfare state. Having said that, I still have to suppress a mild urge to laugh any time I hear Salvation Army bells around the holidays because they immediately remind me of Ayn Rand's phrase "the leper's bell of an approaching looter".

8. Is it just me or isn't it inexcusable in this age of high technology that when someone like me from a ten-digit dialing area slips up and forgets the "1" before a long distance call, he gets several rings preceding an ear-splitting tone and an annoying message about how to dial long distance? Why not a voice mail stating that the call is long distance followed by the option to cancel or continue? Would that really be so hard to do?

9. Help! My head may soon explode if I don't figure out a snappy comeback to all the Christers out there who substitute religious hectoring for common courtesy. Particularly annoying are people who say, "Have a blessed day," instead of something like, "Have a good day." I might be able to pull off "Have a blast, too, man!" if I were a hippie, but I'm not. Any ideas? I don't particularly care what they choose to believe. It's the rudeness I want to make clear. [Update: On further thought, this really applies only to a few exceptional instances for reasons Kyle Haight brings up.]

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Several minor corrections and edits. (2) Added a note to end of Item 9.

Data Storage Then and Now

Pedestrian Infidel blogs an image of 4 MB of magnetic computer storage being hoisted aboard an aircraft in 1956, which Snopes.com confirms to be authentic. For comparison, there's an image to its right of an 8GB pen drive much like the one I carry around in my pocket at work every day.

4 MB, ca. 6 ft., 2000 lb.	8 GB, 2.35 in., 0.48 oz.

The urban legend site quotes an EETimes account:

It started with a product announcement in May of 1955. IBM Corp. was introducing a product that offered unprecedented random-access storage -- 5 million characters (not bytes, they were 7-bit, not 8-bit characters). This first disk drive heralded startling leaps in mass-storage technology and the end of sequential storage on punched cards and paper or Mylar tape, though magnetic tape would continue for archival or backup storage.

The disk drive was big, not quite ready for today's laptop. With its vacuum-tube control electronics, the RAMAC (for "random-access method of accounting and control") occupied the space of two refrigerators and weighed a ton. It stored those 5 million characters on 50 hefty aluminum disks coated on both sides with a magnetic iron oxide, a variation of the paint primer used for the Golden Gate Bridge. [bold added]

Yesterday's storage device was about 30 times longer than today's, 67 thousand times heavier, and yet stored only 1/2000th the amount of data! (HT: Michael Gold)

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Today's magnetic media are no less startling than flash memory when compared to the old hard drive. For example, we own a 120 GB portable hard drive which weighs just ounces and is about the size of a pocket calculator. Iomega offers a somewhat larger "desktop" external hard drive with a capacity of 1.5 TB! (2) Added editorial note in brackets to block quote.

Appeasement in Academia

Thomas Sowell's most recent column will come as quite a shock even to many who are, like myself, well aware of the pervasiveness of leftism in academia. He discusses the fact that, although the '60's ended nearly 40 years ago, the basic, oft-romanticized, approach of backing demands with threats is alive and well.

It is so alive and so well, in fact, that The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article on the subject, inspiring Sowell to weigh in. (Sowell does not specifically name the article, but I suspect that it was "Fearing Our Students". [subscription required])

This professor has been advised, at more than one college, not to let students know where he lives, not to give out his home phone number and to keep his home phone number from being listed.

This is a very different academic world from the one in which I began teaching back in 1962. Over the years, I saw it change before my eyes.

During my first year of teaching, at Douglass College in New Jersey, I was one of the few faculty members who did not invite students to his home. In fact, I was asked by a colleague why I didn't.

"My home is a bachelor apartment" I said, "and that is not the place to invite the young women I am teaching."

His response was: "How did you get to be such an old fogy at such a young age?"

How did we get from there to where professors are being advised to not even have their phone numbers listed?

The answer to that question has implications not only for the academic world but for the society at large and for international relations.

It happened because people who ran colleges and universities were too squeamish to use the power they had.... [bold added]

And later,

One of the rare exceptions to academic cave-ins around the country during the 1960s was the University of Chicago. When students there seized an administration building, dozens of them were suspended or expelled. That put an end to that.

There is not the slightest reason why academic institutions with far more applicants than they can accept have to put up with disruptions, violence or intimidation. Every student they expel can be replaced immediately by someone on the waiting list.

But instead of punishing bad behavior, most institutions have rewarded it and thereby encouraged it.

It is true that appeasement encourages more bad behavior, but as Sowell points out, things weren't always this way. Why are they different now? On what basis did appeasement become so common in Western civilization that it has crashed the gates even of the ivory tower? It is because the philosophic basis of the Enlightenment has been attacked, with the result that those who should be defending our civilization are intellectually and morally disarmed or even fail to see a need to defend it.

Ayn Rand considered this very question long ago in "The Cashing-in: The Student 'Rebellion'", an essay she wrote in 1965, and which now appears in The Return of the Primitive. Rand concludes that the repleacement of reasoned debate with brute force in academia is the end result of the long playing-out of Immanuel Kant's philosophic attack on the validity of reason.

These "activists" are so fully, literally, loyally, devastatingly the products of modern philosophy that someone should cry out to all the university administrations and faculties: "Brothers, you asked for it!"

Mankind could not expect to remain unscathed after decades of exposure to the radiation of intellectual fission-debris, such as: "Reason is impotent to know things as they are -- reality is unknowable -- certainty is impossible -- knowledge is mere probability -- truth is that which works -- mind is a superstition -- logic is a social convention -- ethics is a matter subjective commitment to an arbitrary postulate" -- and the consequent mutations are those contorted young creatures who scream, in chronic terror, that they know nothing and want to rule everything.

...

With rare and academically neglected exceptions, the philosophical "mainstream" that seeps into every classroom, subject, and brain in today's universities is: epistemological agnosticism, avowed irrationalism, ethical subjectivism. Our age is witnessing the ultimate climax, the cashing-in on a long process of destruction, at the end of the road laid out by Kant.

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. ... [bold added]

Rand discusses such schools as Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and Linguistic Analysis, and continues.

It has been said that Kant's dichotomy led to two lines of Kantian philosophers, both accepting his basic premises, but choosing opposite sides: those who chose reason, abandoning reality -- and those who chose reality, abandoning reason. The first delivered the world to the second. [bold added]

Sowell is correct as far as he goes, but for college administrators and faculty to stop sympathizing with the students (a problem Sowell himself notes) or appeasing them, a real philosophic revolution is required, the one Ayn Rand herself has started with her defense of the validity of reason, her highly original approach to ethics (resulting in a morality of egoism), and culminating her moral and intellectual defense of individual rights.

Those who value the free discussion of ideas and the unstinting pursuit of truth that ought to occur in academia (and have, and can, once again), would do well to start understanding this problem by considering her thoughts on the subject, which remain relevant to this day, and to think about what she has had to say about the various issues leading to our current state.

Only then will one know what a real revolution looks like.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected several typos. Other minor changes.

Quick Roundup 284

Atheism Equated with Religion

Well. The good news, such as it is, is that Ayn Rand finally gets mentioned in the debate about the "new atheists". The bad news is that she is confused with them.

Whatever you may think of David Sloan Wilson after reading this slapdash article (via Randex), in which he misrepresents Objectivism and puts words into Ayn Rand's mouth, credit him for the following succinct confession that he feels that knowledge is not possible without omniscience: "As for the canons of rational thought, to the extent that brains evolved by natural selection, their main purpose is to cause organisms to behave adaptively in the real world--not to directly represent the real world."

This fundamental error in epistemology leads Wilson in turn to: (1) draw a false distinction between what he calls "actual realism" and "practical realism" (whereby delusions can have an evolutionary advantage); (2) conclude that scientific theories are often "purpose-driven" (in a cynical, underhanded sense) and "cannot be expected to approximate factual reality when they are proposed" since so many eventually are disproved -- I mean "become weirdly implausible with the passage of time" -- rather than being connected enough to reality to prove or disprove (But to admit that would be to admit that man can know things, which would defeat Wilson's purpose.); (3) misrepresent and then condemn Ayn Rand's philosophy for holding that certainty is possible.

He does this last by discussing how the "real world" is full of "messy trade-offs" (Does his mind alone directly know this?) as if Ayn Rand never considered such a problem once in her life. Wilson snidely derides Objectivism for "telling" the "believer" "what to do", but in addition to claiming that Objectivism can't offer guidance in "messy" situations, he both ignores the fact that the whole purpose of any ethical system is to provide some guidance for action (especially in such "messy" situations) and the fact that that in the course of living one's life, one can make choices within an ethical framework. Note also that Wilson is smuggling in unquestioned the religionists' premise that ethics is all about commandments.

Not only did Ayn Rand successfully argue against the premise (another that Wilson both assumes and shares with religionists) that ethics is based fundamentally on a consideration of how one's actions affect others, she weighed the risks and rewards of smoking and chose to smoke for a time. And she later changed her mind after receiving medical advice. And so we see both (1) that Ayn Rand did consider situations involving "messy trade-offs" and (2) that her philosophy, by her own example, was not just some inflexible set of marching orders. Rand chose to accept the health risks of smoking so she could enjoy doing it.

Wilson, for all his professed worship of "complexity", for all his blathering about interesting shades of grey, demonstrates through his simplistic caricature of Ayn Rand and her philosophy that he has hardly bothered to learn anything about Objectivism and probably would be unable to appreciate its subtlety even if he tried.

I was originally going to rebut Wilson's charge that we Objectivists accept everything Rand says without question, but upon further reflection, I do not think that this is necessary. How would one take marching orders from someone whose "orders" I would summarize as, "Use your own mind to grasp reality, and in particular, to understand and evaluate as true or false what I have said. Express agreement with me only if you really do agree."

So Wilson thinks that man knows nothing because his brain does not "directly represent the real world" and that people make stuff up as they go along in a "purpose-driven" way. All I can say to that is, "Speak for yourself, Mr. Wilson."

Except that he already has.

Parting shots aside, why is it that evolutionary psychologists never seem to consider whether there might be an "evolutionary advantage" to -- oh, I don't know -- an organism having a brain that supports a mind with the ability to grasp the world economically through concepts, and the ability to regulate itself through free will?

The Objective Standard is soon to arrive!

From Principles in Practice:

The contents of the Winter issue are:

From the Editor

Letters and Replies

Moral Health Care vs. "Universal Health Care" by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh

Instrumentalism and the Disintegration of American Tort Law by David Littel

"Gifts from Heaven": The Meaning of the American Victory over Japan, 1945 by John David Lewis

Here's a thought: Your Christmas shopping could be done in minutes --and it could change a worldview for life. A subscription to The Objective Standard is the perfect gift for your active-minded friends and relatives.

And here's a way!

Creepy Ayn Rand Reference on Post Secrets?

Out of curiosity, I randomly stopped by Post Secret yesterday and found a creepy note reading, "i [sic] plan on telling people that you died," attached to what looks like a jacket on a book by Ayn Rand.

What's up with that?

Walter Williams on Racial Hoaxes

After examining some recent instances in which "civil rights" groups roundly condemned an action as white racism, only for it to turn out that the "perpetrator" was black, Walter Williams sounds the following semi-optimistic note:

More and more blacks are seeing through race hustlers such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Doc Cheatham. An even more optimistic note is the financial decline of the NAACP. Declining black support is good evidence that the civil rights struggle is over and won. That's not to say there are not major problems but they are not civil rights problems.

Today, most civil rights organizations get their financial support from white businesses and foundations caving in to intimidation or seeking to sooth feelings of guilt. [bold added]

I would count the cultural climate that permits such charlatans to continue operating as one of these "major problems". And I would say that the struggle for individual rights is only beginning.

But there I go again, being simplistic!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Clarified section on smoking, added paragraph at end on evolutionary psychology, and made several minor edits. (2) Corrected link to Post Secret. (3) Corrected typo: "biologists" above should have been "psychologists".

Tell 'Em Gus Sent You

Like history? Learn it from a brilliant instructor and -- as my reader -- save money. Read below for how.

On a recent visit to the Getting Things Done in Academia blog, I found an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon posted. Calvin was taking a history test.

Test: When did the Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock?

Calvin (writing as he answers the question): 1620.

As you can see, I've memorized this utterly useless fact long enough to pass a test question. I now intend to forget it forever. You've taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system.

Congratulations.

Calvin (speaking as he faces the reader): They say the satisfaction of teaching makes up for the lousy pay.

This reminded me -- because this has been the exact opposite of my experience -- of the course in European history I am currently taking from Scott Powell's series, A First History for Adults.

Fellow student Jason Crawford, guest-posting at Mr. Powell's blog, Powell History Recommends, explains this contrast very well in "Why I Love Powell History":

The biggest problem with most history classes is that they are simply boring (as anyone who took history in high school can attest). Out of those that manage to be engaging or at least entertaining, the biggest problem is that you, the student, don't retain the material you have learned: you may remember a few individual facts, but not the material as a sum. These classes are little better than storytime.

Powell History solves both problems, easily putting it in the top 1% of history lectures or writing I have ever encountered.

First, the lectures are engaging. Scott tells history for what it is: a grand, dramatic narrative, an epic tale literally about the fate of the entire world. He carefully chooses the characters and events to focus on, and explains the causal connections, the link from one event to another.

Scott shows you the connections between the people, places, and events of history -- not only the causal connections in a sequence of events, but also, through his ... "periodizations", the connections between events in a period, such as the Reformation, the American colonial wars, or the growth of the union in the period before the Civil War. The result is that each period becomes a meaningful mental unit and a means by which the student can remember history.

...

I'm thrilled with Scott's courses. They are what I have been seeking ever since high school: a way not just to hear about history from someone else who knows it, but to learn it for myself. [bold added]

There's more, and I have to say that I fully agree with this review.

But it gets better. I have already noted here that on a per-lecture basis, Mr. Powell's courses are a bargain, comparable in cost to a night at the movies at their normal prices, but he's offering a holiday special at his site right now, with a special deal for readers of this blog!

Mr. Powell's 30-lecture Story of America, normally offered for $449.00, is going for $379.00. (See Kyle Haight's review.) His 20-lecture History of Europe (which I am currently taking) is $289.00, or $60.00 off. And the latest addition to his courses, the upcoming 10-lecture series, The Islamist Entanglement, is $199.00 for the holidays, or $50.00 off.

Those are pretty good deals, but not as good as you'll get as a reader of Gus Van Horn! If you sign up for any of these Powell History holiday specials and tell them I sent you, you will get an additional $20.00 off. (See PS below for how to receive the discount.) That would be Story of America for $359.00, History of Europe for $269.00, or The Islamist Entanglement for $179.00. That comes to $11.97, $13.45, or $17.90 per lecture, and you won't have to endure crowds, sit through previews beforehand, or feel the disappointment that is becoming synonymous with "Hollywood" these days.

Think about it. An engaging and well-organized presentation of history as it can and ought to be taught, in the comfort of your own home, for about the price of a movie and some snacks. Sounds like a great way to spend a few evenings to me!

Sounds like? Is. I'm taking one now myself, and Teller (Yes. Of Penn and Teller) is one of my classmates! And if you want to hear from others who have taken history from Mr. Powell, you can read their testimonials here.

So take a look, think about it, and sign up! You'll enjoy it!

-- CAV

PS: I should have been more clear. To receive this additional discount, you will need to email Mr. Powell at powellhistory@powellhistory.com and mention this referral when you sign up for the holiday rates.

Updates

12-16-07: Added PS.

Lessons Learned

Not so long ago, "civil rights" activists and the left-wing news media put Jena, Louisiana in the national spotlight because, as Thomas Sowell put it:

The issue is the prosecution of a black high school student accused of stomping on an unconscious white student -- and the lack of criminal prosecution of white students who hung a noose on a tree, who were disciplined by the school.

Liberals' skills at moral equivalence have been so finely honed during the long years of the Cold War that they have turned this into a case of "unequal treatment," based on race -- as if putting a noose on a tree is equivalent to stomping somebody who is unconscious. [bold added]

Sowell's piece explores the morally outrageous behavior of the corrupt civil rights establishment as well as some some retaliatory thuggishness by some white supremacists, and correctly concludes, "The last thing the South needs is a return to lynch-mob justice, whatever the color of whoever is promoting it."

At the risk of gilding the lily, let me add that "mob justice" is a contradiction in terms.

As if that festival of moral equivalence and contempt for rule of law weren't enough, it would appear that its sub-themes of censorship and tolerance for violent behavior by black youths have been absorbed by the culture and applied. Not to condone race-baiting, but every noose -- and every off-hand remark about a noose -- it seems, gets a government inquiry and national headlines whether warranted or not.

In the meantime, it seems that children of about the same age as those in Jena, Louisiana, have picked up on the implicit message that beating white people up is not really such a big deal. Combine this message with the fashionable notion that whites have it coming to them for past injustices by (other) whites against (other) blacks and almost anyone can see where this was heading.

Twice it appears, black youths in Baltimore have attacked white bus riders recently.

There has apparently been another bus beating on an MTA bus in Baltimore.

WBAL-TV reports that two men aboard the #64 bus in Brooklyn claim they were attacked by a group of 7 black teens. The two men say they were attacked because they were white. They also claim the bus driver refused to call police for them.

The two men suffered cuts and bruises.

The MTA says it is investigating the claim.

This comes less than a week after a white woman was beaten on a bus. 9 black middle school students have been arrested in that case.

In the first instance, the victim was a woman. As quoted from news reports by Michelle Malkin:

As Sarah Kreager, 26, tried to sit down on a Baltimore City bus Tuesday, police say, a middle-schooler told her she couldn't. When she attempted to take another seat, a middle-schooler wouldn't let her. Finally, according to police, Kreager just sat down.

She was "immediately attacked" by nine students -- three females and six males -- from Robert Poole Middle School. They punched and kicked her at 2:59 p.m. at the intersection of 33rd Street and Chestnut Avenue, according to Maryland Transit Administration police.

Kreager was dragged off the bus and her boyfriend, Troy Ennis, attempted to get her back on, police said.

She sustained "serious injuries" and had to be transported to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, according to a police report.

Except for the races of the victim and her attackers, this story sounds like it comes straight from the annals of the Jim Crow era.

That there has been a massive outrage and a vocal defense of the six hooligans from Jena -- but a deafening silence over this -- speaks volumes about the depths to which the "civil rights" establishment has sunk.

Unfortunately, children from around the country appear to be hearing and applying the message from today's "civil rights" leadership, which I summarize as this: "It's okay to attack white people if you're black."

I somehow doubt that this is the glorious ideal of Martin Luther King's dreams.

As Ayn Rand once put it so eloquently, "The smallest minority is the individual." It is precisely this minority that race-baiting leftist and white supremacist alike seek to oppress. The fight for the only real minority rights -- individual rights -- will not be anywhere close to over until all instances of racially-motivated thuggery are greeted with the same degree of moral outrage by everyone.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 283

The Flynn Effect

Having not so long ago considered an oft-ignored aspect of the question of whether intelligence and race are correlated, I was first intrigued and then very impressed with this article on the "Flynn Effect", named for James Flynn, who first noted that scores on IQ tests were rising over time and then asked why that was in a very creative and productive way.

As this article considers the Flynn Effect and the recent revival of the debate about race and IQ, it takes a look at the many pitfalls inherent in attempting to measure intelligence and raises serious questions about more than one popular myth about the genetic basis of IQ. Near the end, it also considers how such factors as the culture in which one is raised can affect one's IQ. Its conclusion was a breath of fresh air:

Flynn then talked about what we've learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children -- and that evidence didn't fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn't make a difference whether it's a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn't make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children's blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness -- of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. "The mind is much more like a muscle than we've ever realized," Flynn said. "It needs to get cognitive exercise. It's not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark." The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person's mind but the quality of the world that person lives in. [bold added]

Read the whole thing!

"It was like time stood still!"

If you've ever had a sufficiently frightening experience, you will know exactly what the above title means. Yesterday, I learned from the Houston Chronicle that scientists are attempting to study the commonly-reported feeling that time "slows down" when people are extremely frightened.

Eagleman's research team developed a wristwatch-like device that flashed numbers across a screen at a rate slightly too fast for a normal person to read. He theorized that, if people really could take in more events during times of stress, the free-falling participants should have no problem reading the flashing numbers. But none of them could. "We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix, dodging bullets in slow-mo," he said.

The subjects, who had to read these numbers while free-falling backwards, still reported that the fall seemed to take longer, and this study does not eliminate the possibility that the brain can function more rapidly in other modalities during times of stress.

This is an interesting and very difficult problem to attempt to study, and it is far afield of my area of specialization, but one thing immediately jumps out at me: Reading numbers has nothing to do with ending the free fall early. (This is just an observation, not necessarily a criticism of the study.)

If a remembered feeling of time dilation were an aspect of heightened focus as one attempts to quickly find a solution to a life-threatening problem, rather than some fear-induced higher temporal resolution of one's senses, this test, designed to measure the latter, could well have little or nothing to say on that matter.

For those who find this question interesting, the actual paper is available here. And yes, part of the experimental apparatus was an amusement park ride! See Figure 1.

How NOT to Lay off One's Employees

Leave them off the invitation list to a company Christmas party:

Our source tells us that "when the brain trusts sent out the holiday party email they only sent it to people who would still be here -- even though some of us hadn't been notified we were on the block yet."

That is bad.

I recall hearing awhile back about another firm that laid off some of its employees via a mass memo sent to their PDAs. I never thought I'd see someone equal or exceed even that level of carelessness.

Myrhaf on Reagan's Legacy

Myrhaf considers whether we should include Reagan on Mt. Rushmore:

Reagan's pragmatism toward Iran and terrorism, with his non-response to the Beirut barracks bombing and his Iran-Contra Scandal, makes him the single man most responsible for our feckless Middle East policy. ...

The size of government more than doubled during the Reagan Presidency. You can blame it on Tip O'Neill's Democrat Congress, but the fact is that Reagan didn't have what it takes to stand up to the big spenders. Such weakness is the stuff of mediocrity.

Worst of all, Reagan brought the Religious Right to power, destroying the Goldwater paradigm of a party dedicated to individual rights. ...

That same argument would go for the Reagan dime -- unless you made things interesting by taking the dime to be a commemoration of our worst president, given the welfare statist currently depicted. But then you might want a bigger field to choose from if don't already consider FDR to be our worst President....

-- CAV

Shlaes on the "Fair Tax"

I would have preferred an article that voiced opposition to all government confiscation of property (i.e., taxation as such), or at least took a more consistent stand against the welfare state. Nevertheless, Amity Shlaes raises some objections to the "Fair Tax" which pro-capitalists will find worth considering.

Says the author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression:

The FairTax does away with the income tax, corporate taxes, estate taxes and just about any other federal levy. It also kills off the Internal Revenue Service. Under the FairTax, Washington would apply a single national sales tax on purchases, whether a DVD player, or a new house. To take the edge off the pain for lower earners, the FairTax offers them a monthly rebate. [A welfare state element like this in an allegedly free-market reform is a red flag, as if proposing a new way to tax isn't a red flag in and of itself. --ed]

...

[T]his catalog of features doesn't mention one thing: the rate. That's because a national sales that captures the sort of revenue Washington needs requires a 30 percent rate. [She notes, as I have, that the 23% rate proponents cite is really a 30% rate. --ed]

...

A third and significant FairTax problem also has to do with Europe. Europeans introduced their own version of the Fairtax, the value-added tax, while they talked of curtailing the income tax. But when the time came, they retained that levy, generating the double-tax burden that corrupted Europe in the first place.

To avoid such a dual system the U.S. really has to pass that constitutional amendment, and the chances of that are, well, real low. What else? Even the FairTax needs enforcers, so while the IRS may go, another form of tax police will emerge.

...

The other source of the FairTax's appeal is more subtle. Tax increases are coming one way or another. Medicare Part D, as well as Social Security, will simply require those increases, not only because of statutes but also because Americans expect ever-greater entitlements.

Even a construct as sturdy as the FairTax can't withstand those expectations. Put the federal tax beast in the FairTax cage, and you'll find the states are the ones raising rates. Or that the bill for it is postponed and shifted to younger generations, as the Social Security burden has been.

So the choice is simple. The country can start thinking about reforming entitlements soon, starting with ratcheting down those expectations. Or it can cheer the Fairtax Bus through November and into law. [bold added]

As one who once fell for a different primary season tax gimmick, I agree with Shlaes. This idea is a gimmick. It is an attempt to evade the fundamental problems posed by the nature of the welfare state as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth. (The problem of enforcement, which proponents soft-pedal, is just one way this problem rears its ugly head.)

I will say one thing. While it is now highly unlikely we could repeal the 16th Amendment, it is precisely the kind of cultural and political climate in which such would become inevitable that we must work for if we are to ever see a return of low taxes (See PS.), self-reliance, and economic freedom to America. This is a daunting task, but it will never be accomplished by the evasive quick fixes of the "Fair Tax" brigades or by the resignation of nominally pro-free market economists who discount the need to intellectually defend capitalism.

So, sure, we can't fix the Constitution or the tax code, or rid ourselves of the welfare state.

Yet.

-- CAV

PS: On re-reading this, I realized that I slipped here. Just to be clear, any return to low taxes worth fighting for will be on the way to no taxation. A much smaller government, limited to its proper functions, can and should be funded voluntarily.

Updates

12-13-07: Added a PS.

Quick Roundup 282

Jumpin' Geminids!

Doug Peltz has the scoop on an upcoming meteor shower:

Here in North America, the best time for viewing will be the evening of Thursday, December 13 (with the meteor rate increasing as the night goes on) and somewhat also the evening of Friday, December 14 (declining as the night goes on).

In an email to the OList, he also mentions that, "This year will be especially good since the Moon won't be around to drown out the fainter meteor streaks."

$150.00 (Cheap!)

As a kid, I enjoyed reading my parents' rather extensive Mad magazine collection. Via Arts and Letters Daily, I have learned that for the princely sum of 150 smackers, one can buy a two-volume set celebrating artist Don Martin's contributions to the magazine.

Holleran Pans Golden Compass

I enjoyed The Golden Compass. Qwertz "was neither disappointed nor blown away".

And Scott Holleran?

Loaded with intellectual ammunition, such as Lyra demanding to know why someone helps her, saving self first and a noble character refusing to live in shame, religionists are right to sense that The Golden Compass is not another Biblical fantasy, but directional signals are not a sense of direction, so neither is it a secular alternative.

I often agree with Holleran's interviews, but in this case, I think he's being a bit too hard on the movie.

Concentrated Nanny-State Imbecility

California is going to order a study of the effects of caffeine on pregnant women and their fetuses so it can label caffeine-containing soft drinks for their protection, and yet:

The label requirement would not cover coffee and tea, which have much higher caffeine levels, because the stimulant occurs naturally in those beverages. Proposition 65 only applies to chemicals that are added to foods or products.

...

The College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the March of Dimes, the Mayo Clinic and other health organizations have said that moderate amounts of caffeine -- about two cups of coffee a day or seven soft drinks a day -- are safe for pregnant women. [bold added]

Wow! You have man-made caffeine as evil and "natural" caffeine as good, a government-funded study as a prelude to new regulation, and only partial protection from negligible risk all rolled into one!

And we haven't even brought up the fact that concerned women could just take the simple expedient on their own of avoiding caffeine.

Who says that California doesn't waste public funds efficiently?

-- CAV

Science: Handmaiden to Theology

Recently, I have taken note on several occasions of the common leftist tactic of using science as part-smokescreen, part-pseudojustification for various proposed forms of government interference in our lives, most notably environmentalist regulations whose stated purpose is to stop "climate change".

A given debate which should be about whether the government ought at all, say, to impose fuel rationing (in the form of "carbon caps" for a whole economy) is entirely swept under the rug of the scientific debate over whether man produces enough carbon dioxide to alter the climate.

And just as the conservatives have adopted big government in recent years, so have they begun adopting this dishonest tactic. Case in point: a recent article in The American Thinker which similarly uses a recent scientific advance in stem-cell research as a means of advancing the so-called "pro-life" position in the abortion debate:

What happens when an unexpected development suddenly makes it no longer necessary for adherents of a certain ideology to engage in conflict? The recent discovery that gives scientists the ability to turn skin cells into cells that share identical properties with Embryonic Stem Cells qualifies as such a development.

Up to this point, many from the left had comfortably seized control of the high moral ground on this issue. With aid from the media, and the assurance by the scientific community of the vestigial healing powers of Embryonic Stem Cells, they piously condemned the supposedly callous ignorance of those who objected to their demand to expedite legislation requiring that federal tax dollars be used to fund Embryonic Stem Cell Research (E.S.C.R.).

For these so-called "progressives", the fact that human embryos needed to be harvested and killed in the process did not pose the least moral quandary. Instead, it was favorably cast as a supremely justifiable means towards an unimpeachably noble end. History will deal with them accordingly. [bold added]

Leave aside, for the sake of argument, both the legitimate scientific question of whether the new technique produces cells that really are identical to embryonic stem cells, and the matter of whether the state should fund scientific research at all.

The propriety of using embryonic stem cells has nothing whatsoever to do with whether there are alternative means of acquiring stem cells with the required properties. It is moral to use embryonic stem cells because embryos are potential -- not actual -- human beings. (To the extent that leftists fail to make this point and rely on an altruistic justification instead, they help the conservatives by playing into their hands, and in more ways than one.)

But when one has science "on his side", one can pretend that such utility was the only real justification -- flimsy as it was -- for using such stem cells, and that one should thus outlaw harvesting embryos. Should a scientist raise an objection that the new cells are not identical to those from embryos, he will be condemned just as roundly as any global warming "denier" is now pilloried by global warming hysterics. And there will be no talk by conservatives such as Miguel Guanipa about whether embryos really are human, or about how damaging to the cause of individual rights it would be for the government to pretend that mere tissue possesses rights.

The left would paralyze us in a debate over the scientifically controversial minutiae of meteorology as they smuggle in government control of the economy as an unquestioned premise. The right would have us fumble around in a specialized area of cell biology as they sneak in a government intrusion justified by their superstitious belief in an immaterial soul. In both cases, laymen, out of their depth, are told to grapple with abstruse points in scientific specialties while steered away from fundamental questions of political philosophy they could much more reasonably be expected to deal with.

I oppose both the drowning of the truth by the left, and the abortion of its pursuit by the right.

-- CAV

Thornton on Free Speech

At City Journal is an article by Bruce S. Thornton that both names an important truth about how leftism has damaged the state of free inquiry on our college campuses and yet still makes a major mistake. The piece does this while considering two noteworthy recent cases: Columbia University's invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a guest speaker and the cancellation by the University of California at Davis of a speaking engagement by former Harvard president Lawrence Summers. I'll concentrate on the first of these here.

First, Thornton hits upon a noteworthy fact about the Columbia case that my moral outrage had caused me not to pay much attention to:

The purpose of academic freedom is to encourage the search for truth and the exposure of error, an endeavor conducted through what Matthew Arnold called "the free play of the mind on all subjects." ...

At the same time, since academic intellectuals are supposed to be trained in the principles of sound thinking, one should expect higher standards for the ideas considered on campus than for those that contest in the town square. Not every idea is worth the university’s attention. Today, no one wants to give time to someone arguing for a geocentric cosmos, a flat earth, or space-alien construction of the pyramids. ...

Columbia, then, was terribly mistaken in inviting Ahmadinejad onto campus, for what serious ideas did he present? That the Holocaust never happened, that a cabal of Jews runs the West, and that homosexuals don’t exist in Iran? ... [bold added]

As Thornton's title puts it, the selection of this speaker trumped the pursuit of the truth.

This is the case, but it is in addition to the gross injustice -- the moral treason -- of inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia in the first place. Oddly enough, there is no sense of outrage in the Thornton piece, or even mention of the moral dimension of this controversy.

Why?

One need look no further than how Thornton differentiates between academic free speech and political free speech or, more precisely, how he defines each of them in the process.

John Stuart Mill articulated the rationale for political free speech, with which most of us are familiar: even noxious ideas should be publicly aired so that they can be exposed and refuted. Moreover, ideas that in one era seem pernicious or absurd -- abolishing slavery, or giving women the franchise -- may wind up considered worthy and true in another. This process of refuting or acknowledging ideas requires a "town square" free from censorship or punishment, so that as many voices as possible -- and as many ideas as possible -- can be heard. Political free speech serves a practical end: to discover the best public policies through citizens' raucous, sometimes woolly discussion in the town square. As Mill put it, "We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still." [bold added]

This is mostly good up until the Mill quote. Mill to the contrary, we can, in fact, objectively evaluate an opinion, and it is precisely this fact that makes political free speech necessary and good.

This is because man's survival as a rational animal depends on his having a firm grasp of reality, including how his society ought to govern itself. It isn't that we can "never be sure" whether an opinion is worthwhile or hogwash: It's that we won't have a way to tell without freedom of speech.

Thornton sees that political speech is a call to action and that as such, calls for deliberation. (So he does have a partial, albeit implicit and slippery grasp of this fact.) And yet he sees it as divorced from truth. Conversely, he sees also the quest for truth in academia as nearly divorced from action!

The purpose of academic freedom is to encourage the search for truth and the exposure of error, an endeavor conducted through what Matthew Arnold called "the free play of the mind on all subjects." As such, it is less practical and more speculative than political speech, and more frequently at odds with the accepted views of society. Unlike political speech, its goal is not to persuade fellow citizens to action, but to get closer to truth. [bold added]

On the one hand, it is true that the more abstract ideas typically discussed in academia are not always obviously applicable to politics or other aspects of our daily lives. In that sense, academic free speech is "less practical and more speculative" than political speech. But this does not mean, as many (and it can be argued that Thornton isn't among them) hold, that academia has nothing to do with the real world.

For example, suppose this were still the days of slavery and an academic were holding forth the notion that the black man is, too, a rational animal with rights. Although he is speaking in abstract terms, it is plain that practical discussions of how to implement his position will need to follow swiftly once he makes his case, and that his lectures imply a call to intellectual action on the part of those who agree with him. That is, his views will need to be debated more broadly as quickly as possible.

Lost in this discussion is the fact that abstract philosophical ideas have practical consequences. Indeed, such ideas guide the rough-and-tumble of non-academic political debate as they penetrate the broader culture through the efforts first of academics, then of intellectuals of varying prominence and influence, including authors, columnists, and other political commentators.

And so to invite a speaker like Ahmadinejad was not just a lowering of academic standards as Thornton argues, or a tacit endorsement of his views as rational as I did here. It was a display of contempt for the truth as such, and therefore of the value and practical consequences of man having a better grasp of the truth.

To fail to seek the truth is immoral. Even setting aside for the moment my own original reason for outrage at Columbia University (related as it is to the additional one I am about to name), there remains much to be indignant about. Thornton is right that the left has trod the truth underfoot, but a longstanding confusion about the relationship between the abstract and the concrete causes him to miss the fact that that's our neck down there under the hooves as well.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 281

Martin's Getting Things Done

Martin Lindeskog seems to have become interested in adopting David Allen's personal productivity methods and points to a few pertinent sites I had not previously heard about, notably Gubb.net, which hosts GTD-type lists on the web, and Callwave, a service that converts voice mail messages to email for free -- I think. (Why am I unsure about this after several visits to their web site? They're in the business of making technology easy to use, are they not?)

I do have to say that I disagree strongly with the writer who advises that one use email as a to-do list. Not only would this blur the boundaries between your to-do list and email, it would also make it that much more difficult to eliminate email as a distraction from other tasks by checking it only a few times a day. I strongly suspect that David Allen would agree with me there.

After the last two very hectic weeks, I plan on a GTD update of my own, as much to think out loud out what I could have done better as to measure my own progress/pat myself on the back for having managed that particular time crunch as well as I did.

A Cure Worse than the Disease

I am no fan of religion in general or Scientology in particular, but the fact that the German government might ban the faith within its borders is disappointing.

Not only does this indicate a flawed grasp of the right to freedom of speech (and its importance) there, but it also betrays a lack of confidence in secular, Western ideals. I certainly don't see Scientology as a serious competitor in the free market of ideas, and know that my arguments will trump their assertions in the minds of those who count: honest, rational men.

Oh yeah, and Monica is correct when she considers a rationale for the possible ban and says, "I'm not exactly sure what is meant by 'exploiting followers for financial gain.' Most churches do that, too. That doesn't mean we should ban them."

The Golden Compass

Meanwhile, in Canada and the United States, the Catholic Church is both confessing a lack of confidence in its ability to compete in an environment of unfettered debate and demonstrating why separation of Church and state is such a good thing. Some parochial schools are removing Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, from their shelves and in the United States, the Catholic League is urging a boycott of the Golden Compass movies based on it.

Kiera McCaffrey, spokeswoman for the Catholic League, says the anti-Christian themes are watered down in the film, but she and others worry the movie might entice youngsters into reading Pullmans' novels.

"If parents see (the movie) they might think, 'What a great Christmas gift idea? Why don't I get little Johnny or Sally the trilogy?' But if that happens, then little Johnny or Sally will wake up Christmas morning to a candy-coated message of atheism," she said.

In early October the Catholic League sent out its pamphlet, complete with 95 footnotes, to hundreds of groups, including Protestant and Muslim organizations and Roman Catholic bishops. In response, some groups have issued warnings to parishioners or moved to ban the book from church schools. [bold added]

And look at the bedfellows this crisis has made!

But I have already spoken here about why certain Christians find a challenge to their faith so psychologically threatening -- in this case that they'll team up with Moslems against atheists. When I did, I said:

[Those who take religion seriously] scare me for the exact opposite reason I scare them. They want to physically "stamp me out"; I simply remind them of all the questioning and thinking that they have shirked for their whole lives.

And so it is with Philip Pullman.

As for the movie itself, I very thoroughly enjoyed it when Mrs Van Horn and I watched it Saturday evening. Although I have not yet read the novels, I think that Qwertz gives an even-handed assessment of it in his review (which includes spoilers):

The books are really for young adults, not children. And the filmmakers decided to make the film adaptation suitable for a younger audience. A lot of the subtleties of the novel have to be made … less subtle.

...

All of these changes, individually, are understandable. But together, they noticeably lessen the horror and moral outrage we are supposed to feel over the Magisterium and intercission. The movie reads like a naive, headstrong girl on a fun adventure with bears, witches, and bad guys.

...

All that said, there was a hell of a lot to like. For those who know what's going on, most of the important stuff is there. (Sometimes, though, it did feel like Lyra had read the book before-hand. E.g., when Lyra figures out that the Oblation Board is cutting away daemons.) They haven't really changed the message; they've just fiddled with the way in which it is presented.

It is visually scrumptious. I very much want a jet zeppelin now. There are some lovely set pieces, and the Lyra/Iorek relationship is developed very nicely. ... [bold added]

Not being familiar with the books, I could be guilty of reading more into it than there is here, but I found the idea of intercission -- of separating a child's body from his soul (daemon) -- to be an excellent metaphor for what religion does to man. Ayn Rand put this well in a dialogue between the characters Kira and Andrei in We the Living:

"Do you believe in God, Andrei?"

"No."

"Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It means nothing. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do--then, I know they don't believe in life."

"Why?"

"Because, you see, God--whatever anyone chooses to call God--is his highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception over his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your life and to want the best, the very greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it." [bold added]

This cutting-off of happiness from "this" life is achieved in large part by a life-long drumming into the skull of the notion that man is not an integrated whole of body and spirit, but a union of a corpse and a ghost.

This is an outrage, and the behavior of the Church here resembles that of the Magisterium in the movie, even in the small detail of seeking to quash rational inquiry, as one letter-writer to the Houston Chronicle put it so well:

The Catholic League apparently still pines for the days when the church could order books and apostates burned. Apparently, there are those in the Catholic League who are sorely afraid that young people might read something that could spur their imaginations beyond blind faith in "approved" publications. The Golden Compass projects no religious view at all, but because its author does not tow the line of C.S. Lewis, they want him banned. This is one reason the Constitution forbids a state establishment of religion that would have the force of arms to put down non- and alternative believers.

(I will note here that banning the book in its own schools and calling for a boycott are certainly not the same thing as calling for government censorship, and do not violate anyone's rights. However, considering the large amount of effort the Church puts into injecting religion into public policy debates (e.g., on whether a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy should be protected), this reflects a lack of secular power as much as a fear of inquiry into religion.)

This movie is about an organization that attempts to sever body from soul in young children and wants to stop people in the pursuit of the truth. How telling it can be when life imitates fiction!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.