Rust Belt Philosophy

Ahh - there's nothing quite like getting a bunch of scientists together and asking them a loaded question that really has very little to do with science. Some time back, the John Templeton Foundation rounded up a dozen thinkers (most of them scientists) and asked them whether in their opinion the universe has a purpose or not. Now, it should be obvious that this question really asks, "Do you believe in God?", but because this happens at the level of subtext, nearly all of the questionees awkwardly shuffle around it for a while and then give half-hearted replies. Let's watch.

The first respondent, Lawrence Krauss, responds in the negative. While some of his reasons make sense, this argument is missing a certain key premise: "...no such unambiguous signs [of purpose] have been uncovered among the millions and millions of pieces of data we have gleaned about the natural world over centuries of exploration. And this is precisely why a scientist can conclude that it is very unlikely that there is any divine purpose. If a creator had such a purpose, she could choose to demonstrate it a little more clearly to the inhabitants of her creation." Though seemingly a decent argument, it really falls halfway in between the stated and the implied questions. Surely the lack of evidence of God makes a good case for the nonexistence of the same, but that's not really what he said and it's not really the question he was supposedly addressing - could not the universe have a purpose without the kind of god who wants to be pals with us? It seems that it could, and while that theory is pure speculation and therefore not a particularly effective argument for a universal purpose, it still doesn't work for Krauss to ignore it altogether.

Next up, David Gelernter. You can read all about his mistakes in Jeffrey Shallit's analysis. But do note when you read Gelernter's argument that he apparently believes in the Christian God and yet finds it totally reasonable to think that "man [would] have been better off had he never been created." Omnibenevolence indeed.

Paul Davies - physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist - demonstrates why he's not also a linguist in his reply. "Doing science," he says, "means figuring out what is going on in the world–what the universe is 'up to', what it is 'about.' ... If the universe is pointless and reasonless, reality is ultimately absurd." Even if he didn't realize at the outset that being "up to" something has nothing to do with being "about" something, that last sentence should have clued him in: an absurd universe is one without laws, not one without a plot. If these things were really the same, we would never be able to understand mistakes, because those aren't "about" anything - by definition, they have no point and no intended reason. Especially in a field like cosmology, one finds patterns in purpose-less things all the time: orbits, the formation of stars and planets, and so on.

Skipping over Peter William Atkins's answer, which I mostly like, we come to maybe the silliest of the entire bunch. Nancey Murphy thinks that a purpose can be discerned by comparing "competing traditions on the basis of the support they draw from their own peculiar kinds of evidence ... [and] on the basis of the intellectual crises it faces." Besides the fact that she totally underestimates science ("Two crises facing what I call the scientific naturalist tradition ... are the questions of whether it is possible adequately to explain the phenomenon of religion naturalistically [yes!], and whether the tradition can provide grounds for morality [yep!].") and really has no concept of how physics works ("If it is the strength of gravity that causes broken bones when children fall, why not a kinder, gentler gravitational force?"), taking a survey of world religions tells one nothing at all about whether those religions are correct. More to the point, such a survey even if conclusive wouldn't necessarily demonstrate a purpose - Christians, for example, can't even decide if the purpose of the universe is to support intelligent life as such, or to glorify God, or to allow for Jesus's sacrifice, or...

For his part, Owen Gingerich is so infatuated with the argument from design that math itself cannot reach him. Considering the many-universes hypothesis, Gingerich admits that "we would naturally be found in the universe that, like the little bear's porridge, is just right. Those other barren universes, many with no stars or planets, would exist in their own forever unobservable space. Somehow," though, he finds this to be "an unpersuasive counter-argument. Even one congenial universe out of many would be miracle enough." In fact, this is just plain wrong. On the assumption that infinitely many universes exist, "one congenial universe" is no miracle at all but rather a certainty. Taking on certain mathematical premises while denying their direct implications does not, needless to say, make for a very convincing argument.

Bruno Guiderdoni's argument for purpose can be summed up in one sentence: "the millennia of Homo sapiens' evolution is something I find quite ... puzzling." Well then puzzle over it some and refrain from making conclusions.

Despite the solid thinking underlying much of Christian de Duve's response, he has some bad news for art critics. Whereas science gives us a way to understand some things about the universe, he says, "music, art, and literature [allow us] to approach another facet of this reality, emotional and esthetic, rather than intelligible." Besides being not particularly relevant to the question of purpose, this makes the bizarre claim that no art is intelligible. Sorry, Roger Ebert - now you're just some fat guy!

Filling the role of the token hippie, John Haught does as much to undermine his argument for purpose as he does to support it. Humans are special in nature, he says, because we search for truth (Haught has, apparently, not heard of Scientology), and since we "are drawn toward truth, so also is the natural world that gave birth to your mind." Strangely, he refrains from making a similar statement about whether or not the natural world is drawn toward "birdsong and the howling of wolves" even though those, too, "are nature" in the exact same sense as our truth-seeking. So, to summarize: the universe, despite not being conscious in even a metaphorical sense, is "drawn toward" truth because truth-seeking is an attribute of one species therein, but other attributes of other species don't count for some reason. Maybe Haught has simply been spending too much time hanging out with Michael Phelps, but whatever the case, his claims fall somewhat short of being convincing.

If you liked Neil deGrasse Tyson from his appearances on the Colbert Report, chances are you'll like his answer to this question even more. I myself have no major complaint with it, so I'll leave you to read it for yourself. Jane Goodall's answer, on the other hand, makes me sad. She basically runs through a compendium of all the bad arguments already made. History is indeed replete with belief in "gods, goddesses, spirits and demons of classical mythologies of the animist religions," but so what? The question of purpose in the universe is not one we can put up for popular vote. And yes, we can ask lots and lots of interesting questions - like "Why are laws of physics designed to make life ever more complex?" - but the fact that we must ask them immediately implies that we don't know the answers. Goodall also makes the apparently very common category error of confusing a process with a part of that process, saying that because "[e]volution is a blind process" our lives must be "equally without purpose." Et cetera and so on - nothing new, nothing useful.

Elie Wiesel, so far as I can tell, doesn't actually answer the question. If anyone out there thinks that he does, please let me know. But I want to return for just a moment, before I close this post, to a very obvious pattern in all of these answers that nonetheless often goes overlooked. Recall that the question centered on purpose - why, then, do all of the responses address design? At first it may seem like these two things are intimately related, but in fact there is no strict logical connection between them. Purpose, first of all, does not necessarily imply design: one can use a rock for the purpose of smashing someone else's skull, but that by no means indicates that rocks were designed to be weapons. Second, and maybe more subtly, design needn't come from purpose. Some designed things, for one thing, fill an entirely different purpose than their designer intended - microwaves, for example, were not originally designed to heat food. More strongly, some designed things have no other purpose than the design itself. Some people believe that art falls into this category, but everyone should be able to remember creating something designed just for its own sake or just to see if they could. (To give a concrete example, not everyone who draws spirals does so because they're aiming for the golden ratio.) But the idea of purpose requires a further goal, an end related but not identical to design itself. In almost every case, these brief essays understand "purpose" to mean "design" and in particular "design of the sort that will result in intelligent life," but that connection is only justified if we already know (a) that at least one designer exists and (b) certain dispositional facts about this designer. At best, the kind of arguments encountered here can only prove (a); typically, as in these cases, they fail even to do that. So insofar as the Templeton Foundation wanted to make progress in fallaciously connecting design, purpose, and theism, these essays did their job. Insofar as they were supposed to make a good case one way or the other about purpose, though, almost all of them leave a great deal to be desired.

From yesterday's Dan-Brown-worthy defense of Sarah Palin, we move to something only slightly different: a Dan-Brown-worthy attack on Sarah Palin. Better yet, this attack comes from someone who "would like to loooove Sarah Palin" but simply cannot due to - of all things- Bristol Palin's recent interview. Carol Platt Liebau, the elder Palin's not-so-anonymous admirer, calls "the interview...an unforced error" on the part of Gov. Palin. She does not, unfortunately, take the time to explain how a decision that one adult made can reflect badly on a totally different adult - I mean, what was she supposed to do, ground Bristol and lock her in her room? I'm pretty sure that's illegal to do to someone who's eighteen years old. Maybe if Liebau was willing to use Bristol's decision to criticize Gov. Palin's parenting skills (that is, as opposed to her political skills) this would have made sense, but since she did not, the argument positively reeks of non sequitur.

Maybe, though, this has something to do with their gender - after all, Liebau, Bristol, and Sarah are all women. What say ye, the Vatican? I know you think that "[m]en and women sin in different ways," but I'm not really convinced. If for no other reason, this conclusion "was based on a study of confessions carried out by Fr Roberto Busa," one of the many, many random old guys in the Holy See's employ. Not to disparage the good friar's intelligence, but surely the self-chosen testimony of only people who confess cannot reliably predict how all people sin. Even on the very generous assumption that confession-going Catholics are a representative sample of everybody, by definition one only confesses those wrongs that one feels require absolution. As such, it's entirely reasonable to posit any number of socio-psychological forces that lead one gender to identify certain kinds of sin as more serious than the other gender does. Anyway, greed is 7th out of 7 for men and 6th out of 7 for women? I don't bloody well think so.

Speaking of reading too much into things, we come to the title-appropriate conclusion of today's post. As could have been predicted, one of the market fetishists over at Big Hollywood felt "certain that ABC’s Oscars telecast this year may go down as the lowest rated ever" just because its Best Picture nominees grossed relatively little. Long story short: wrong. At the very least, Steve Mason (the errant predicter) should have tried to come up with other mitigating factors. He talked about Hugh Jackman, but it's trivially easy to come up with another reason to have watched this year's Oscars as opposed to past iterations - in particular, there were more storylines. Heath Ledger's award should have drawn at least a few viewers, Milk's potential should also have lured in a certain political group, and then, of course, there was Slumdog Millionaire, which had the very convenient advantage of being the subject of an underdog narrative (can an independent Indian movie really win, etc.). Whatever the reason for the viewing numbers, it should be transparently obvious now that box office totals do not directly predict Oscars ratings - but, then again, Big Hollywood does specialize in ignoring the transparently obvious. Keep Mason's failure in mind next year, and together we'll learn what really does happen to those who do not learn from their history.

There's a dark joke somewhere in the ancient practice of bloodletting about what happens when the patient doesn't begin showing any signs of improvement, but I don't know what that joke is - maybe something with a punchline along the lines of, "Well then, cut me again." The humor dwindles, though, when the patient is us - take as a case in point 2000-2008. During the Bush administration, a certain class of quack doctors on the right attempted to heal our politics by spilling progressively more and more of our political lifeblood. By cutting away at the efficiency, effectiveness, and openness of government - those things that form the foundation of governmental goodness - they thought they would perfect, in some sense or other, the role of the state. At this point, even those who don't want to blame the amateur MDs responsible for the mess we're in recognize that something went awry. But the question remains: how should we, acknowledging the failure of Bush governance, react? For Thomas Sowell, apparently the answer is, "Cut me again."

For Sowell, the time is right to call in Mulder and Scully. He says that there must be a conspiracy afoot in today's political scene because "[t]he emotional responses to [Obama and Palin] -- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day." As for those conservatives taken by Obama's pragmatism, Sowell chastises them for forgetting "that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic," too and concludes that they "are obviously bending over backward for some reason" so that they can reject Palin. It cannot be that they have any real reason to hate her, Sowell continues, because "[p]eople who actually dealt with her, before she became a national figure, have expressed how much they were impressed by her intelligence." Rather, he believes that the educated elite despise Palin and praise Obama simply because each represents "a whole vision of the world and a way of life" and those elite would rather see Obama's vision of the world win out over Palin's. As such, "the Republicans need some candidate who is neither one of the country club Republicans nor-- worse yet-- the sort of person who appeals to the intelligentsia." The burgeoning insanity in this argument is hard to ignore.

Godwin eliminates Sowell's first argument, and his second falls just as easily: even if we had good reason to trust those people whose testimony would paint Palin as not a moron, we now have much more testimony in the other direction. However, and this bears repeating, no opinion poll's results can conclusively demonstrate a person's intelligence, so Sowell's use of Palin's reputation is a fallacy. Things really get interesting, though, when his argument nears its ending. He tells a story about this one time in Britain when people wrongly used surface appearances to judge politicians' characters, then proceeds to use this lone instance to say that the GOP must move in a direction that intelligent people don't even like. No small amount of paranoia spills into this post-hoc argumentation: people got into trouble one time by siding with their lifestyle over their politics, Sowell says, therefore we must never ever allow that lifestyle to have any credence ever again. The phrase "using a crane to crush a fly" comes to mind here, but it doesn't fully encompass the lunacy of Sowell's conclusion.

Whatever danger Sowell thinks lurks in trusting a person's class membership clearly could not be limited to those in the upper echelons of society: stupid, unsophisticated slobs who only trust their own, after all, are just as manipulable as sharp, classy elites who only trust their own. Despite the clear logical symmetry, Sowell's addled mind is only capable of understanding this situation as working in one direction, as representing a one-sided narrative in which "Sarah Palin is both a[n overdue] challenge and an affront to [Obama's] way of life." This, ladies and gentlemen, is the very epitome of the light-headed, pallid bloodletting patient lurching back to the doctor's office to request another incision. Palin cannot possibly be "overdue," as we've just exited from eight very challenging and affront-laden years; more importantly, she cannot be safe just because she isn't "one of us" any more than Obama must be dangerous just because he is. About the only part of this whole situation that Sowell gets right is that Palin does indeed represent something safe and familiar to a certain group of individuals - but so what? Some people think aspirins and psychological therapy are dangerous, whereas others see no threat whatsoever in the world's mean temperature increasing several degrees, and it is precisely these people whom we should ignore. If Sowell wants to complain that the media coverage of Palin and Obama doesn't focus enough on their policies, he should probably focus on their policies; if he wants to say that it's always bad to follow politicians on the basis of their lifestyle, he should probably not exclude Palin from that rule; if, in short, he wants to make any damn sense, he should learn to write (and, presumably, think) like someone who isn't a total and complete partisan hack. We're just beginning to stagger out of a brief dark age of politics, so let's please not pull a 180 just because of some advice from "America's leading philosopher" that hearkens back to the dark ages of medicine.

In regards to Mike Almeida's and my (ongoing?) discussion here, I think it's worth taking a moment to explain why most free will defenses will only ever partially answer the problem of evil. For those who don't recall, the problem of evil complains that the world contains too much evil of too many varieties for God (as widely understood) to exist. To answer this, people often explain that something having to do with free will compensates for this evil. Such answers fall under the umbrella of free will defenses, and I've already discussed a few. They include the idea that humans have to be able to sin so that God can forgive us; that we have to be capable of freely loving God (which in turn entails the freedom to do bad things); that freedom itself is valuable no matter how it's used; and so on. Where they all fail is in explaining the diversity of evil and suffering.

Take Almeida's proposal, namely, that worlds with justice and moral failure are perhaps better than those without either. It should be immediately obvious that this has nothing to do with God's apparent failure to protect us from natural disasters and other non-willed suffering, but in fact its incompleteness runs much deeper than that. Remember, these defenses will only be able to explain as much evil as their good accounts for, in quantity or quality. The nice thing about justice, from the theist's point of view, is that it seems to account for the quantity of evil rather well, because perfect retributive justice means that everybody gets exactly what they deserve for their misdeeds. However, there's no indication that the good of justice requires the kinds of evil that we see. (Indeed, there's much to be said about non-retributive justice, which doesn't require any evil at all.) In other words, this defense, if successful, only explains the kinds of evil necessary for justice. This might seem initially like a non-starter, because who knows what kinds of evil even exist, but many theologians in fact have richly developed (if somewhat weird) systems of ethical classification. Many say, for example, that there are sins strictly against God and sins against God and people (some also add sins against just people). The justice explanation seems rather ill-equipped to explain these latter two categories. Or take the Catholic division between venial and mortal sins: if this difference actually exists, why would justice need both kinds? Most Christians, further, believe in a distinction between Jewish-Bible sins and Christian-Bible sins - why would God need both of those types in order to instantiate justice? (Similarly for Jews, would justice alone really require a separate set of commandments for Jews and gentiles?) And so on and so forth.

Similar criticisms can (and should) be leveled against all other free will defenses. In order for any of these to fully succeed, it must explicitly match in robustness its author's moral ontology. But - at least, in all of the articles I've ever read of this sort - they instead simply discuss evil as a generalized phenomenon and leave it at that. Moreover, after doing this, they need to do something similar for suffering. The popular response to non-evil suffering is just to call it instrumentally valuable (as a learning tool, say), but not all suffering falls into this category. Moreover, learning has really nothing to do with justice (or Jesus's atonement, or loving God, or...), so replying in this way either starts a whole new argument (i.e., about the value and necessity of learning) or is a non sequitur. In some sense, a real danger exists here for theists that isn't present in the metaphysical case: insofar as gratuitous suffering is a consequence of biological or physical reality, theists will in essence have to explain biology and physics in a theological light. If that were at all easy or straightforward, it would've happened already, and indeed, the closer science comes to a complete understanding of the universe, the harder this last task will become. That nobody has even come close to a satisfactory theo-scientific account of natural suffering makes it rather doubtful, then, that anybody ever will. More doubtful still is the idea that they'll manage to do so with the idea of free will.

Using our freedom as a blanket excuse for evil, then, is intellectually lazy at a fundamental level. While some types of freedom explain some types of evil,* saying that any kind of freedom explains every kind of evil is about as sane as saying that we should expect to find every kind of animal in any random zoo we walk into. Just like an underdeveloped understanding of zoos might lead one to believe that they all have reason to include all kinds of animals, the stunted reasoning of free will defenses intimates that only one degree of freedom exists for sentient beings and that this lone degree suffices to explain all the evils we experience. To the contrary, though, we know that zoos have specific criteria with which to narrow down the kinds of animals that would best fit their needs. Similarly, in order for God to allow evil because of any individual good connected to free will, God must pare down the list of all possible evils to only those which are needed for that good's fulfillment. Otherwise, the best God we can logically post is one we wouldn't even trust to run a tourist trap, let alone an entire universe.

*This seems like as good a place as any to note that I think the entire project is wrong: I think it's logically possible (and would, for God, be feasible) to create interesting, significantly free creatures who nonetheless cannot actively do evil. I know Plantinga disagrees, but I've yet to hear a good reason why.

Or, not. According to Bruce Bialosky, most people overestimate our current economic troubles because - and I am not quoting this out of context - they have never "experienced a real recession." Those of us who think things are serious now just have "never seen really challenging times," is all. You could keep reading the column if you want, but that's pretty much the extent of it. Aside from one pretty basic economic misunderstanding and a large amount of gratuitous and extraneous biographical information, one can summarize Bialosky's argument as such: y'all are pansies. He will have to forgive me if I remain unswayed by that rousing piece of encouragement.

Last night, I watched a Chris Rock stand-up show in which he claimed - at least partially jokingly, of course - that Americans worship money. As silly as that may seem, bear in mind that people often cite economic measures, such as the stock market index, to prove a point about the popularity, intelligence, or even morality of an action. Nate Silver examines one such argument here and finds it wanting. For my part, I'll just ask the following question: even if Silver's wrong and the market's ups and downs really do indicate its opinions on various topics, why should we care? Witchcraft is witchcraft, whether it happens with tea leaves or loose leaf.

Someone has been ODing on her bitterness pills lately, it seems: Diana West, that master of the rhetorical question, wants to know what's up with this whole Afghanistan thing. "Don't we ever realize," she wails, "that not only is there no 'trust' or 'confidence' for us to 'win' there, but there isn't anything else, either? Because there isn't, and that's the lesson I draw from seven years of war in Afghanistan, not to mention six years of war in Iraq." More precisely, she worries that the Joint Chiefs' recent focus on "the 'trust' of the Afghan people ... has placed the marker for American success not on the ability of U.S. forces to execute their missions, but on the emotional reaction of the average, illiterate, infidel-hostile, modernity-challenged Afghan to those missions," and that this misplaced focus hinders us from figuring out what she already has, namely, "that Afghanistan and Iraq are not defensible fronts in this battle against expansionist, jihadist Islam... these countries constitute a pit in which our resources sink and disappear without even the possibility of resurrecting them as a bulwark against jihad in the future." If we can, let's leave Ms. West to her Linkin Park and her Hot Topic clothing and see what we can make of this argument.

For those who have been paying attention, the most striking feature of this argument is its strident defeatism. It's not enough for West to say that we did not win, nor even to say that we cannot win, so she throws in the extraordinary claim that there is no winning in the Middle East, period. This is, of course, a major departure from her earlier stance, which ardently defended the wars, even going so far as to call anyone who opposed them "racial bean-counters" driven by "PC-think." But people should be allowed to progress in their knowledge, at least so long as that progress happens in a positive direction. Her recent change of heart regarding the war on terror, however, is progress of the most political sort: reject Bush, the unpopular Republican, so that one can then begin to criticize Obama, the popular Democrat. When she isn't busy complaining - a mere month into his presidency - that the "required reconfigurations [away from war] won't happen in the Obama years," West apparently spends her time urging the new president to be more hostile towards Muslims - just, you know, not the ones in what she once called the most important front in the war on terror.

Assuming she ever resolves this schizophrenic position-shifting problem she apparently has, West might also want to brush up on her military jargon. When Admiral Mike Mullen calls trust-building "our most important and most difficult objective," he does not, as West says, mean either that "all the United States needs now to win victory in Afghanistan is to win the 'trust' of the Afghan people" or that trust-building is a military end in and of itself, let alone the military end. In reality, West has things almost exactly backwards. Mullen thinks that winning the locals' trust is necessary for military success in Afghanistan, not sufficient. Too, he quite clearly means that obtaining that trust is just a tactic - albeit a key one - used in a strategy that has become known as the surge, not that it is, in itself, the entire strategy. Indeed, West herself seems at times to understand this, saying that one can only defeat insurgencies "if the 'civilians' [Mullen]'s talking about loathed the 'insurgents' he's talking about more than the 'us' he's talking about." Confidential to Ms. West: that's what he means, stupid.

None of this is to say that the war on terror was a good idea in the first place, nor that it has been handled well (or even adequately) since its inception, nor even that it's a good idea now. At the same time, though, West cannot continue to withdraw political credit from an empty account. First, we had to fight them there so that we didn't have to fight them here; now West wants us to fight them here so that we don't have to fight them there. At the Iraq war's inception, she argued that Iraq and Afghanistan's political and ideological differences were subordinate to their strategic similarities (which, of course, were total fictions); now she says their strategic similarities make their political and ideological differences irrelevant. On West's view, Islam poses a legitimate threat to the entire western world, and as such we have an obligation to confront it wherever it might go, from "Iran [to] Yemen [to] Gaza [to] Madrid [to] London" - just, please God, not in Afghanistan or Iraq. Combine these panicked mood swings with an utter lack of military understanding, and West's position starts to look increasingly irrelevant. When we leave the region - which, I hope, will be rather soon - we damn sure ought to do so for the right reasons, not because of an argumentation style that values theatrical exasperation over thorough explanation.

As far as irony goes, skeptical theism is pretty good. A response to the skeptical position enunciated by the problem of evil* - namely, that humans lack any good explanation for how God and certain kinds of evil could coexist - skeptical theism holds that humans simply lack the kind of knowledge necessary to classify evil in this way. Defined by Alex Pruss, the view goes something like this:

"...for any evil E, we have no reason to think that the prevention of E will lead to an overall better result than letting E happen, so the fact that we do not see God preventing E is not evidence against the existence of God."

Nick Trakakis and Yujin Nagasawa phrase it as follows:

"Our knowledge of goods and evils, as well as the interconnections between them, is very limited. (Therefore) For all we know, there are goods beyond our ken G which justify God in permitting [any given evil] E."

Stephen Maitzen characterizes skeptical theism as saying that:

"...given the vast disparity between God's omniscience and our own limited knowledge, it should not surprise us if we fail to grasp the reasons that actually do (indeed, must) justify God's permission of suffering."

And so on - generally, skeptical theism relies on at least one of these two principles:

(1) Until we fix certain flaws in the current formulation of our known moral systems, we cannot know for sure that they would indict God for failing to prevent any given evil. If we don't know for sure that our current moral systems would indict God for failing to prevent any given evil, we don't know for sure that the problem of evil works.
(2) Until we fix the absence of certain special goods in our current moral systems, we cannot know for sure that morality on balance would indict God for failing to prevent any given evil. If we don't know for sure that our current moral systems would indict God for failing to prevent any given evil, we don't know for sure that the problem of evil works.

Pruss's formulation above tends towards only including (1), whereas Trakakis, Nagasawa, and Maitzen tend towards accepting both. Following a view like Pruss's typically leads to Butterfly Effect-esque scenarios (such as "break[ing] [sic] to avoid hitting a pedestrian, and that caus[ing] an earthquake in Japan next week") that result from the idea that "our world is deeply chaotic." And indeed, chaos theory provides at least a decent source of doubt regarding long-term causation, because we know how in principle to distinguish between chaotic and non-chaotic systems but have not even begun to do so in matters of morality. However, neglecting to include considerations from (2) makes skeptical theism a rather wobbly view, as (1) tacitly admits that we already have the right moral systems even if our application of them may be wrong.

Consider the example that Pruss himself provided: the evils in question are relatively well-defined, which means that the moral ambiguity must come from another source. All such examples, moreover, have defined end points - in this case, the Japanese earthquake (or lack thereof, depending on the choice made). Far from undermining the problem of evil, then, the only thing that objections of this sort can accomplish is to kick the can down the road a bit. Do not evaluate goods or evils now, it says, because some other information might come to light later. But this can be easily avoided for a proponent of the problem of evil and, in point of fact, has been easily avoided already. Not only have skeptics established canonical figures for whom this is a moot point, such as Rowe's fawn (scroll to 3.2.2), they should (perhaps counterintuitively) happily accept the premise that more information would yield a better judgment even in non-moot cases.

This is the case because such a premise puts the onus back on the theist. After all, if we continually gather data on a given seemingly gratuitous evil, we should eventually begin to see its gratuitous (if not also its evil) nature fade away - at least, if the skeptical theist is correct. Even Pruss's more generalized example fits this strategy. By way of making an analogy, he proposes two games, A and B, each with an infinite series of hidden steps. Even though, as he says and as skeptical theism points out, this hiddenness makes it hard to evaluate the games initially, as the steps get revealed - in other words, as we continue to live our lives - we can make more and more accurate guesses about which is the better game. That is, at any given step of A or B - even without knowing what the rest of the steps hold - one can certainly say, "Given only what I know now, one of these games is better than the other." This statement gains credibility if, as in the case of real life, we develop a detailed understanding of a pattern that governs each step of the games. Since having credibility in saying that one of Pruss's games is better than the other is equivalent to saying that (epistemically) probably gratuitous evils exist, it's all that one needs to run the problem of evil successfully.

The only way to avoid the inevitable result of this line of thought - i.e., that gratuitous evils in fact don't look even slightly less gratuitous or evil as time goes on - is to provide counterexamples, and lots of them. Given that no effort to provide such counterexamples has succeeded outside of Scrubs, though, the (1)-only version of skeptical theism reduces in the end to the ultimate self-renewing distraction: it pretends that, in order to form a conclusive moral judgment based on what knows, one must also include everything that one does not know. Since that latter category will never be exhausted or even delimited, it's a bottomless pit for anyone gullible enough to step into it. In the end, we must exclude such diversions from our thinking or else risk total solipsism. What, then, of versions that also include (2)?

Trakakis and Nagasawa stumble upon a telling aspect of any view on the order of (2): it must hold both that "[f]or all we know, there are goods beyond our ken G which justify God in permitting E" and also that "[f]or all we know, there are [no] goods beyond our ken G which justify us in permitting E." In other words, (2) implies that, in some way or other, God has access to moral goods that exceed our reach. Just with this we can begin to propose attributes of these goods. They could, for instance, be goods that only God has the power to achieve. They could also rely on God's nature as a deity for their goodness. Whatever the case, though, they cannot be quotidian goods. Having established this, the question cannot help but arise: can we identify any such special goods?

Regular readers of this blog and anyone familiar with the literature should already know the answer: yes. In fact, not only can such goods be identified, some candidates already have been. Peter van Inwagen, for instance, suggests that one good that only God could produce is a regularly ordered world. Alvin Plantinga has written articles theorizing that Jesus's life and free will may also be such goods. For their part, Trakakis and Nagasawa reiterate an idea of Richard Swinburne's that claims that God has special rights in virtue of having created us (sort of in the same way that parents have special rights regarding their children). So far, so good, right? Proponents of (2)-inclusive skeptical theism needed to at least come up with a few proof-of-concept goods in order to demonstrate the feasibility of their view, and they have. That means they're in good shape, does it not?

Take another look: in order for skeptical theism to succeed, an element of mystery is required. By specifying the goods that they did, van Inwagen, Plantinga, and Trakakis and Nagasawa have left the realm of skeptical theism and moved into regularly ordered theism, or divine incarnation theism, or parental theism. In fact, skeptical theism as a view would have been better off if there weren't any proofs of concept, because then theists would at least have been able to hide behind the claim that special God-only goods are in principle inaccessible to human thought. Van Inwagen et al have effectively disproven that notion, though, which means that theists can and should be expected to provide actual examples of the special moral systems that (2) hints at. Moreover, since all of those special goods fail to fully or even partially explain evil,** skeptical theists should also be expected to explain why their special God-only goods will succeed where the others have not. Insofar as anyone argues for skeptical theism as such, then, they too argue for a postponement of judgment - "I think there might be some extra values somewhere that might explain this, but I have not found them yet." The proper response to that statement, as in the case of (1)-only theism, is, "Good! Call me when you find them, but until then, all you're arguing is an empty hypothetical."

At this point, the skeptical theist will be tempted to say that I'm simply missing the point of the view. The point is exactly the emptiness, the lack of perfect moral knowledge in humans. Without filling in that gap, there will always be at least some doubt. And while this is in the absolute strictest sense correct, in this context, it's also irrelevant. Theists - all of them, without exception - feel qualified to offer conclusive moral reasoning in every other matter, from personal everyday actions (such as whom we sleep with and how) to universal and even metaphysical matters (such as how a person can be saved from damnation or why God was justified in flooding the entire planet). Furthermore, the majority of them also say that God very much wants us to know all about God and God's perfect opinions on morality. Somehow, when it comes to these things, we can trust our moral reasoning entirely: it's definitely wrong to have sex with someone of the same sex; it's definitely right to proselytize; it's definitely right to do whatever the Bible or one's church says to do and definitely wrong to do what it says not to. Most tellingly, when oddities arise in strictly religious moral reasoning, we try to resolve them. Even those rare divine command theorists for whom God's word is a moral rubber stamp will explain that God makes an action moral just by saying it is. For the vast majority of their moral reasoning, then, even skeptical theists discard their skepticism and stop trying once they've reached a plausible conclusion, even when that conclusion is based on incomplete or imperfect moral knowledge. To demand a higher standard of non-theists is stupendously inconsistent and, in my view, borders on the pathological.

There are surely many valuable arguments to have about how much evidence and what sort of evidence is required in ethical contexts, but there is also a proper context in which to have them. Skeptical theism, rather than addressing these concerns at the appropriate time, apparently prefers to move fluidly between different epistemological standards as needed. If this took place with respect to a largely unknown god who wasn't explicitly interested in interacting with humans, enabling humans to reason reliably, this would perhaps be forgivable. The God of skeptical theism, though, teaches humans about morality honestly (as per the Bible), gifts humans with reliable reasoning capacities (as per Plantinga and others), and repeatedly claims to have a stake in whether or not humans use those teachings and capacities successfully. This makes skeptical theism a joke at best and a scam at worst. If we can act on our best guess when it comes to standard matters of moral decision-making - which skeptical theists say we can - and if we can act on our best guess when it comes to extraordinary matters of moral reasoning - which skeptical theists say we can - then this, too, must be subject to our best guess.

*If you ever get sick and tired of me talking about this, just let me know. So that I can ignore you.
**The one I haven't already written about, the Swinburne-Trakakis-Nagasawa "God is your dad" analogy, clearly does not work. Parents have special rights regarding their children only insofar as they treat those children responsibly, which God has not done. But assuming that the analogy is valid, that still weakens God too much, because a morally perfect being would never reason that, simply because it has the right to be cruel or neglectful, it will. In other words, God needs a perfect record of not just moral blamelessness but also of never settling for an acceptable or a good action when a better action exists.

Why not just name your child "Lulubelle-Mae Redneck"? I mean, I understand that naming a child can be tricky, but you should really be able to figure out what's wrong with a name like Marybeth Hicks pretty quickly. But maybe I'm not giving Ms. Hicks's parents enough credit: maybe they gave her a fake-sounding name to better prepare her for her eventual life as a chronicler of other people's lives who also have fake-sounding names. It certainly seems to have served her well in her column about the equally badly-named Bristol Palin, in which she (Hicks) attempts to rebut the young Palin's claims regarding the unrealistic nature of demanding abstinence from teenagers. Hicks basically has two things to say about abstinence: first, it's no good just to "say we're better off accepting that children and teens will do the things we warn against anyway, so a better, safer route is to manage the outcomes to the degree we're able"; and second, even if abstinence is too much to expect, "unrealistic expectations drive the parenting bus." If these arguments represent in any way Hicks's usual level of cognition, it's safe to say that she's living up - or down - to her regrettable moniker.

Contrary to the standard abstinence-only line, the suggested alternative includes more than just damage control. Even if it didn't, Hicks would be logically obligated to point out that such an option exists. Instead of acknowledging either of these, though, she pretends as though only abstinence-empty education can substitute for abstinence-only education - and, further, that some mysterious group of pragmatists somewhere actually recommends abstinence-empty education. But even these basic points may exceed Hicks's mental faculties, because they assume that the arguer knows that the question is one of what happens in schools, not what happens in homes. Hicks, on the other hand, consistently limits her argument to parenting. Despite correctly identifying Bristol's stance as opposing "her mother's views on abstinence," Hicks mistakenly contextualizes this opposition as happening only in the privacy of one's own home. In actuality, Sarah Palin drew the kind of flack she did precisely because she wanted abstinence-only education to happen outside of people's homes, so this interpretive move by Hicks is, to put it lightly, somewhat odd.

I agree that parents ought to have unrealistic expectations for their children - indeed, I think it would be helpful in general for people to have unrealistic expectations of each other - but it just doesn't make sense to say that high hopes alone are powerful enough to defy the laws of statistics or, when a child gets knocked up or decides to drink underage or whatever, the physics that govern risky behavior. If Bristol Palin can't teach Marybeth Hicks this fact, it's rather doubtful that anybody can.

The list of individuals I will never, ever write about has now reached three:

Ann Coulter
Ray Comfort
Kevin McCullough

Read the article yourself if you really want to know why, because I have no desire whatsoever to write an entire post about it. Be warned, though: if you concur with these people and if you value honest discourse at all, you should probably not read McCullough's piece while driving or operating heavy machinery, because the courts have not yet recognized an insanity defense that extends to cover someone else's loose grip on reality.

Mike Almeida, I am disappointed in you. If this is the best you can do with the problem of evil - to turn God into some kind of emo Watcher - then you are an embarrassment to your department. For those who are not Mike Almeida, the linked post over at Prosblogion ("A Philosophy of Religion, By Which We Pretty Much Mean Problem of Evil, Blog") tries to say that "we should read the free will defense as illustrating how God might not be justified in allowing moral evil, but might be excused for allowing moral evil." Following lines we've seen before, Almeida proposes that "moral evil is...such that God cannot prevent it without interfering in the exercise of the libertarian freedom of moral agents and [thus] producing an outcome that is overall worse." The argument follows a standard tactic in debates that focus on moral reasoning: find an ostensible good (or evil) that you would like to cast as actually bad (or good), and then find a way for circumstances to render that thing bad (or good). This can succeed quite well, if used properly - the most obvious examples of this happen in movies, from the James Bond films to Coen brothers movies and most everything in between. Almeida's use of it, however, fares much worse.

We've already seen one incredible consequence of the view that God is morally prohibited from stopping any evil at all: the mere fact of free will suffices to over come any number of arbitrarily grotesque evils.[*] As though that weren't repellent enough, Almeida's proposed solution doesn't even cover all of its bases. Since he specifically focuses on libertarian free will, his defense leaves out all evils that do not result from libertarian-free choices. While the obvious answer to this is that an evil that does not result from a free choice is a contradiction in terms, this in fact will not hold on many religious views of ethics. This is trivially easy in the case of the religious ethicist for whom evil is just an absence or privation of good, because most absences of goodness are simple facts of nature not due to anybody's free choice. Still other theories hold that any action that isn't good must be evil, if only slightly so. Even for people who take other views, though, one thing remains constant: failing to prevent unnecessary suffering is a sign of moral imperfection. Even for theologians who consider gratuitous pain not to be evil as such, for God - or any being whom one can evaluate morally - to allow that kind of suffering indicates that God could act in a more perfectly ethical manner. Nor, to reiterate the earlier point, can Almeida beg off to free will here, because a vast amount of pointless anguish comes from sources that do not have free will, such as diseases. Most sadly of all, though, this defense tells us nothing new about the problem of evil. It's old news and we ought to treat it as such: the free will defense applies only to part of the original problem, and where it does apply it turns morality on its head. Just like putting on red-tinted sunglasses won't actually make all sunlight red, turning the free will defense into the free will excuse won't actually excuse God at all.

[*Added 2/23/09 - Almeida comments, and very rightly so, that it could equally be the case that something that merely requires free will be the thing that suffices to overcome any number of grotesque evils. He specifically suggests as one such thing Jesus's Incarnation & Atonement, which I've already discussed. Sorry about the screw-up, Mike, but in fairness, that was incidental at best to the main point of this post - note that the only tagged fallacy is the hasty generalization regarding chosen vs. non-chosen evils.]

It's well known that inerrantists - people who believe that this or that religious text contains no errors - run into major problems when asked to justify that position. Especially when a book makes claims that fall outside the realm of empirical investigation and require serious interpretation, it's difficult to defend that book without assuming that at least part of it must be true and thereby begging the question in at least some small way. One might even be tempted to ask, as in Alex Pruss's formulation, "What's the use of having an inerrant text, if your interpretation of the text is fallible?" Pruss, though, thinks he can at least begin to answer this question and thus defend the inerrantist who nonetheless cannot fully and logically prove that, say, the Bible is entirely true.

Much of Pruss's argumentation here happens through analogies. "It would be silly," he says, "to ask" a similar question about a calculator, because we know that, with calculators, "there are three sources of errors: the calculator, the data input, and the reading of the output. Surely it is a good thing to be able to eliminate one of the three, even if the other two remain." Presumably Pruss has never actually used a calculator, or else he would know that failing to correctly enter input or interpret calculator output is not at all the same as failing to interpret Bible output. For one thing, any seemingly off calculations can be relatively verified trivially - by other calculators, by hand, by approximation, or simply by re-running the numbers. Biblical statements, on the other hand, have nothing against which they can be independently checked - a notion that may seem controversial but that we'll return to later.

For his second analogy, Pruss looks to astronomy. The question "'What's the use of p?' even when met with no answer," he explains, "gives us reason to deny p. What's the use of the moon? I don't know, but my not knowing the use for it doesn't seem to significantly affect my confidence that it's there." Again, the moon doesn't track particularly well to the Bible for the precise reason that nobody (at least, at this point in history) wants to use the moon as a source of divine revelation. Moreover, Pruss seems to read too much into the question here. Maybe the uselessness of an inerrant text could become the basis for an argument against the existence of such a text, but more importantly (and more commonly) the uselessness of an inerrant text alone suffices. In other words, if we can successfully prove (either inductively or deductively) that no inerrant book has an inerrant interpretation in any significant aspect, we then have good reason to act as though no inerrant text exists. Basically, on this line of thought, the text-as-such holds no water: humans, after all, can only act on a text-as-interpreted, which means that the inerrance of any text-as-such simply doesn't matter. Here, then, the analogy itself is relatively unproblematic, but the basis of making the analogy - that uselessness supposedly implies nonexistence - seems very much to be flawed.

A question remains, though, as to whether a perfect text could contribute in some meaningful way to the universe (or just to humanity) without a perfect means of interpreting it. Pruss has a few suggestions, but none of them really work. The first and most obvious such suggestion is that "there may be wide exegetical agreement on certain basic points," and agreement of this sort points strongly enough to inerrance at least on those points that they can be safely trusted. (Or, to put it in the words I used earlier, that such agreement can serve as an independent check.) It's telling, though, that Pruss never names an example: even on the most fundamental issues regarding a faith, believers cannot agree. Offering an empty hypothetical in this way distracts from the conversation rather than contributing to it - it's on the order of saying, "I know you believe in evolution, but what if I could find something that could not possibly have evolved? Then you would be wrong - therefore, your belief in evolution is wrong!" Pruss, though, continues on to propose a benefit of an inerrant text even in the case when no agreement exists: "progress in interpreting the text is apt to get us closer to the truth of the matter in the subject the text is about," whereas the opposite happens with false texts. In fact, though, this is simply not true. In the long term, developing an interpretation more fully always increases subject knowledge (otherwise proof by contradiction would be impossible);* in the short term, on the other hand, one cannot trust even a true text to produce a true interpretation. Since this argument almost certainly amounts just to confirmation bias, let's move on to Pruss's third and final argument for the usefulness of an inerrant text even in the absence of an inerrant parsing method.

Though seemingly a last-ditch effort to save the value of inerrancy, this objection in fact concedes the argument altogether. Rather than naming even one benefit of actual inerrancy, Pruss claims that the mere "belief that Scripture is inerrant has inspired many people to obey various good commands." Very well, but so what? This could happen even with the most flawed text imaginable, so in fact this gives us much more reason to think that inerrancy is useless than that it is useful. But note that this use relates not to the meaning of the text but rather its effect on people: what Pruss argues, then, is really besides the point of the original argument. Inerrancy, he says here, might ultimately not contribute at all to our ability to interpret or learn from a text, but it may have this or that other benefit. For a critic of inerrancy, though, that's more than enough - as soon as Pruss admits that inerrancy would have no practical effect, the argument is for all intents and purposes lost. Unless both a text and its associated interpretive methods are verifiably inerrant, that text is just as useful (or useless) as any other as a learning instrument: insofar as it teaches consistently applicable lessons, it's reliable; insofar as it contains either empty content or false content, it should be rejected.

*At least, insofar as such knowledge exists. An atheist will likely say, for instance, that there is no knowledge to be had about what God meant when God said x because God never did say x. This wrinkle won't affect Pruss's point, though, because (for instance) both Islamic and Christian texts make the same kinds of claims, so probably neither book outnumbers the other in important but not knowledge-appropriate questions of interpretation.

Man, these Barack Obama/Blazing Saddles jokes never get old...

When answering questions about his chosen approach regarding the government's response to the banking collapse in this country, Obama gave two arguments about why we ought not emulate Sweden's response to a similar problem. First, he said, "Sweden had like five banks. We’ve got thousands of banks." Okay, fair enough: the extent of the required government involvement and commitment would put us in a somewhat untenable position. His second reason, though, makes much less sense. "Sweden," he said, "has a different set of cultures in terms of how the government relates to markets and America’s different. And we want to retain a strong sense of that private capital fulfilling the core — core investment needs of this country." I'm with Matthew Yglesias on that one: "I don’t think it’s a valid objection for the President to offer. What he’s describing is precisely the situation I fear; a situation in which public officials are refusing to do what needs to be done out of what amounts to ideological rigidity." In other words, singing "Tradition!" from the rooftops may sell tickets, but it cannot explain an objective fact about the efficacy of this or that bailout program. For someone who campaigned on the idea of change, this is a rather weird piece of conservatism.

(Spoilers throughout, I guess.)

As promised - although after a hefty delay due to technical difficulties - today we'll take a look into the American conservative mind as seen through the lens of a movie projector. The Corner, in partnership with Big Hollywood, recently concluded its countdown of the best 25 conservative movies of the past 25 years, and I want to mine them for trends. More specifically, I want to play the "what would a space alien think" game and try to discern what American conservatism is just by my analysis. Below I will list each of the selections together with a link to that movie's imdb entry (for easy reference) and what I consider to be the money quote of their short review (that is, the one that best explains its presence on the list). But don't say I didn't warn you: what you are about to see will shock and confuse you.

25: Gran Torino
"[Eastwood] blows away political correctness, takes on the bad guys, and turns a boy into a man in the process. He even encourages the cultural assimilation of immigrants," even though "his exotic Hmong neighbors embody traditional social values more than his own disaster of a Caucasian nuclear family."

24: Team America: World Police
"...the film’s utter disgust with air-headed, left-wing celebrity activism remains unmatched in popular culture."

23: United 93
"United 93 opens as four Muslim terrorists pray in a hotel room. Several hours later, the hijackers’ frenzied shrieks to Allah mingle with the prayerful supplications of United 93’s passengers as they crash through the cockpit door and strike a blow against those who would terrorize our country."

22: Brazil
"Brazil portrays a darkly comic dystopia of malfunctioning high-tech equipment and the dreary living conditions common to all totalitarian regimes. Everything in the society is built to serve government plans rather than people."

21: Heartbreak Ridge
"A welcome glorification of Reagan’s decision to liberate Grenada in 1983, the film also notes how after a tie in Korea and a loss in Vietnam, America can finally celebrate a military victory."

20: Gattaca
"The movie is a cautionary tale about the progressive fantasy of a eugenically correct world..."

19: We Were Soldiers
"...it treats soldiers not as wretched losers or pathological killers, but as regular citizens [who were] willing to sacrifice everything to do their duty..."

18: The Edge
"[The protagonists learn] that there is neither wisdom nor nobility in waiting for others to save them, and that they must take responsibility for their own lives and souls."

17: The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe
"The good guys, meanwhile, recognize that some throats will need cutting... Underlying the narrative is the story of Christ’s rescuing man from sin—which is antithetical to the leftist dream of perfected man’s becoming an instrument for earthly utopia."

16: Master And Commander
"[The ship is] a coherent society in which stability is underwritten by custom and every man knows his duty and his place."

15: Red Dawn
"Released at the midpoint of Reagan’s presidential showdown with the Soviet Union, this [is the] story of what was at stake in the Cold War."

14: A Simple Plan
"...whatever transcendent inspiration there may be to moral principles, there is also the humble fact that morality works."

13: Braveheart
"Braveheart taught that freedom is not just worth dying for, but also worth killing for, in defense of hearth and homeland."

12: The Dark Knight
"...Batman has to devise new means of surveillance, push the limits of the law, and accept the hatred of the press and public. If that sounds reminiscent of a certain former president..."

11: The Lord Of The Rings, parts 1, 2, and 3
"The debates over what to do about Sauron and Saruman echoed our own disputes over the Iraq War."

10: Ghostbusters
"...you have to like a movie in which the bad guy...is a regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA, and the solution to a public menace comes from the private sector."

9: Blast From The Past
"Alicia Silverstone is a post-feminist woman who learns from him that pre-feminist women had some things going for them."

8: Juno
"...pro-life..."

7: The Pursuit of Happyness
"Based on the life of self-made millionaire ... [He is] black, but there’s no racial undertone or subtext."

6: Groundhog Day
"For the conservative, the moral of the tale is that redemption and meaning are derived not from indulging your 'authentic' instincts and drives, but from striving to live up to external and timeless ideals."

5: 300
"...this action film [is] about martial honor, unflinching courage, and the oft-ignored truth that freedom isn’t free."

4: Forrest Gump
"Tom Hanks plays the title character, an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s."

3: Metropolitan
"...a roguish defender of standards and detachable collars delivers more sophisticated conservative one-liners than a year’s worth of Yale Party of the Right debates."

2: The Incredibles
"[The plot] celebrates marriage, courage, responsibility, and high achievement."

1: The Lives Of Others
"It chronicles life under a totalitarian regime as the Stasi secretly monitors the activities of a playwright who is suspected of harboring doubts about Communism."

Now easing into my role as space alien, I feel rather confused by this list. It's conservative to institute new and illegal forms of surveillance, but monitoring the activities of citizens is totalitarian? Morality always works, but sometimes it doesn't? Conservatives ought honor traditional values, except when other cultures have them in which case those cultures still need to be assimilated? As a conservative, one must always know one's place and role, but one also has to bear full responsibility for one's actions - but only to the extent that doing so doesn't impinge upon this Christ person? It fits with conservatism to stereotype people of Arab and Asian descent, but not those of African descent? For conservatives, each person has an obligation to contribute in proportion to his or her talents, but even regular citizens are willing to contribute everything they have? What?

But no - now that I look again, I do see some consistency. There is some vision of conservative morality, and whatever form this takes, it has its foundations in the past - traditions, and so on. More strongly, this ethic demands decisive action in the face of immorality. War is seemingly never proscribed by the American conservative, even if one has to wage a war all by oneself. Still more strongly, it seems that they must be at war now, with this thing called the liberal. Liberals apparently hate all soldiers, use government power to harass people, and yearn to impose discrimination in society based on race, gender, and even genetic composition. In fact, if this list is any indication at all, liberalism must also seek to undermine marriage, courage, responsibility, achievement, honor, wisdom, nobility, and even life. Well! Whatever problems conservatism has, it can't possibly be as bad as liberalism, right?

(Now, if you'll allow me to drop back out of character...)

Even knowing nothing whatsoever about the actual facts on the ground (so to speak), then, one can see from this list that conservatism is - as I said yesterday - a clusterfuck. Basically the only two things conservatives can agree on are that they are right (i.e., that liberals are wrong), and the proper response to wrongness is violence. If our poor, misinformed alien stuck around a while longer, it might have found out another thing about conservatism: it needs lies in order to survive. Liberalism, far from not having any sense of morals, simply holds a different ethic. The authors above even understand this on some level, even if they would never say so: after all, liberalism has ever been the champion of workplace protections, including (pay attention, whoever put Gattaca on the list!) genetic ones. As the alien's understanding increases, then, so will its mistrust of conservatism.

Assuming that it ever actually watches any of those movies, the alien will learn something even more fundamental and more valuable to conservatism than the outright lie: the art of selective truth-telling. Yes, Gattaca says bad things about eugenics, but it says great things about science - and conservatism does unspeakable things to science. Juno features a person choosing not to have an abortion, but choice is actually the liberal position (plus, there's that whole bit about divorce and single motherhood). The Pursuit of Happyness is an amazing story, sure, but precisely because of the very liberalism-friendly truth that, in the U.S., social mobility isn't all that easy, especially for people of color. As martial as The Lord Of The Rings gets at times, it also portrays multiculturalism, gender equality, and drug use positively. And don't even get me started on Brazil - Andrew Sullivan covered that one already. In fact, outside of the war movies - each of which suffers from the fantastical assumption that one side represents good and the other represents evil - almost none of the movies listed can rightly be called more conservative than liberal, especially given that The Corner apparently has given up on the pretense that George W. Bush wasn't actually a conservative.

These errors, combined with the generally low quality of the movies listed, strongly suggests that the name of the countdown ought to have been, "The 27 Movies From The Past 25 Years That Conservatism Can Best Appropriate." Especially when viewed in the context of the right's ideology vacuum, the list only highlight the problem of looking for one thing that can be called conservatism. When Ken Blackwell had his shot at it, he tried to unite basically every kind of conservative except the war hawk; Tony Marsh wanted to include everyone whose stake in conservatism didn't depend on having an enemy; and now The Corner, in pretty much direct contrast, could barely care less about your preferred religion, economic theory, or political philosophy - at least, so long as you want to find some evil and kill it (and if that evil votes Democrat, so much the better). Maybe, then, what our hypothetical alien would learn is this: at least in the U.S., conservatism is the canonical example of memetics at work. Rather than identifying any particular facts about the world, it almost exclusively relies on the flaws in human thought processes to maintain its popularity. And, if that point eludes our imaginary extraterrestrial, hopefully at least it'll figure out not to trust right-wingers to recommend films: for the most part, this list blows.

[Added 2/16/09: check out, too, what The Rude Pundit has to say about it, which features actual research. Good stuff - thanks, Dale!]

(Warning: minor spoilers for The Watchmen)

For those who have not yet heard, the continuing conservative backlash against the film arts climbed to new and newly childish heights this week. Seemingly as a counterpoint to the upcoming Oscars, The Corner - a conservative group blog - is counting down what it calls the 25 best conservative movies of the past 25 years. They won't be done until tomorrow, though, so I can't write my post on their list for at least 24-36 hours. Even though the internet - as it is wont to do - has already revealed and mocked the full list, I encourage you to wait for my post tomorrow, basically because I'm selfish and I think my post tomorrow will work better if it's the first time you see the whole list. In the meantime, though, I cannot help but notice certain trends among their choices and among their stated reasons for those choices. To warm up for the article I envision writing tomorrow, then, I want to take some time today to investigate the apparently ongoing crisis of identity in the Republican party.

I wrote about this after the election and concluded that Ken Blackwell's attempt to resolve this crisis failed badly. Now, a few months later, Tony Marsh senses that a valid resolution might finally be on the horizon. The Republican party, he says, still can unite "the Lafollete progressive and the Christian conservative; the cultural traditionalist and the fiscal libertarian; the country club elitist [?!] and the military interventionist" even when, as now, those constituencies "seem to have more to argue about than they do to unify around." Wisely, Marsh admits that the current formulation of the GOP formed with an eye towards defeating a common enemy, namely the USSR. But Marsh is no Adrian Veidt: for him, uniting against a (perceived) evil is inferior to uniting for a (perceived) good. In other words, he still holds out hope that the "central thematic" of the Republican party can be more than "We’re not them." His case for this conclusion gets off to a rather bad start, though, when he defines the GOP's "branding problem [as] at least partly a complaint that we lack a" precise and non-contradictory platform and then continues on to say that no "massive philosophical repositioning" is necessary. In that case, one thinks, he must have some special insight into how to undo the Gordian knot of conservativism's competing interests.

It takes him a good while to get there, and he too often provides nebulous and/or definitional suggestions rather than specific and/or actionable ones, but eventually he reveals his grand strategy. Republicans, he says, must focus on "individual initiative [and liberty], limited government, and fiscal restraint." Just looking at those ideals, one might succumb to the temptation to take Marsh at his word. Those things do seem pretty conservative, after all. At the very least, conservatives talk about them an awful lot. Here, though, is where it pays to reflect for a moment. In order to function as a coherent platform for the entire GOP, those four things - personal initiative, personal freedom, limited government, and low government spending - have to be capable of supporting or at least allowing for the desired policies of all the GOP's constituents, and, moreover, this support or allowance must happen in a structured, explicable way. Marsh's four-pronged platform, just like Blackwell's three-legged platform, fails on both counts.

First and foremost, too many conservative positions cannot possibly be expressed as a combination of those four things. Military primacy requires massive government spending; what has been termed national security by conservatives requires (is identical to, really) massive government intrusions; restrictions on marriage or recreational drugs or birth control require even more arbitrary government limitations on freedom and initiative; rewarding personal initiative flies in the face of the marketeer's desire to create a meritocracy (the paradigm case of this being Wall Street); and so on. At the same time, too many liberal positions fall under the same broad names. Especially in the areas of personal initiative and freedom, liberalism has as many horses in the race as does conservatism, if not more, and it's simply not true to say that liberalism takes government efficiency to be undesirable. Even pretending that conservatism and only conservatism were fully encapsulated by those four things would not save Marsh's suggestion, though, because it still leaves unanswered the question of how to resolve conflicts.

Take the stimulus package as an example: many, including the word-bending Michael Steele, believe that the package contains too much government spending and/or oversight. Yet, simultaneously, nobody questions that insufficient government spending and/or oversight will result in unacceptable limitations on personal initiative and freedom. Depending on how Marsh prioritizes his principles, then - and remember that this must happen according to a meta-principle and not wantonly - the actions of Congressional Republicans could either be fundamentally conservative, fundamentally unconservative, or anywhere in between. Thus, even when Marsh's principles aren't implicitly slicing large swaths out of the Republican tent, they still provide no help in distilling the diversity of Republican opinions into a single, coherent, non-reactionary political program.

Just as in the case of Blackwell's mismatched ideas, that Marsh simply skates past all the actual difficulties in his view makes his article rather suspect. To some extent, we've already seen what this means for conservatism as a political movement in this country: it means voting for emblems rather than policies and always finding a villain next to whom one can position oneself as a hero. The maddening success of people like Sarah Palin, the plumber who must not be named, and even Michael Steele evidences this. Each represents a trend in conservative swooning, yet seemingly none can speak for thirty consecutive seconds without descending into incomprehensibility. And, ultimately, the Blackwells and Marshes of the world could wax poetic about the intricate beauty with which conservative ideas mesh without changing the fact that it's precisely the absence of such beauty and meshing that leads to a party's most galvanizing leaders also being its least competent and intelligent. But what does this mean for conservativism as an object of artistic expression? Stay tuned for the answer tomorrow, when I analyze The Corner's picks for the 25 best conservative movies of the past 25 years.

Though George Will mistakenly holds baseball in high regard, give him credit for at least this much: he is a purist. He would never say, like the more hedonistic David Harsanyi, that "[b]aseball's singular purpose...is to entertain us." I don't think Harsanyi actually means this, because they already made that movie, but he still presents it as though it were a valid argument for why "the moral panic surrounding Alex Rodriguez's use of steroids is unquestionably counterproductive." I won't bother wasting all of our time explaining the absurdity of arguing that any means justify the end of entertainment, so let's move on.

Harsanyi's next move is to downplay the importance of the question by reminding us that "baseball just isn't that important." This kind of move remains surprisingly popular despite being about as logical as foisting a Big Mac on a heart patient and then saying, "Look, I know the doctor told you not to eat fatty foods and you were planning on having some salad, but it's not like this is that Oreo milkshake or anything, right?" The point isn't how bad steroid usage in baseball could be, it's how bad it is. Similarly, it doesn't matter what excuse is "often the stated purpose of professional athletes" - A-Rod could say that he picked up his habit as a form of protesting the genocide in Darfur and that wouldn't make taking steroids any more or less ethical or sportsman-like.

To hit for the fallacy cycle, Harsanyi closes on a straw man and an appeal to ignorance. The argument against steroid use can proceed quite safely without the premise that "all drugs in sports are evil," and even the "dearth of information, outside the anecdotal, about the long-term consequences of performance-enhancing drugs" doesn't prove that steroids are either safe or appropriate for professional athletes to use. (Just consider, for example, how long it took us to figure out that playing professional football will mess you up.) At the end of the day, then, baseball is a pathetic excuse for a sport. Er, wait - I mean, at the end of the day, then, Harsanyi is a pathetic excuse for a columnist.

...and baseball sucks.

Denoue-ing a little from yesterday's "the Inquisition was great" post, I would nonetheless like to continue with more or less the same theme. Religions, after all, didn't exactly put all that nastiness behind them once that period concluded nor have religious followers abandoned the idea of apologizing for such nastiness. Indeed, some believers will even speak up in the defense of a system they themselves have already abandoned, perhaps due to a misplaced sense of nostalgia. Such is the case with Rod Dreher, who, despite having left the Catholic church, now wants to argue that its child abuse cover-up counts as a valid application of the idea "that there were certain things that ought to be concealed from the public for the greater good."

His effort to that end begins, as has become worryingly typical, with a number of irrelevant examples used to set the frame of the discussion. Having lost his Catholicism as a direct result of investigations into said abuse scandal, Dreher admits that he "made a deliberate decision not to investigate scandal in the Orthodox Church in America," his new church, because "the truth that [he] helped tell about what some in the Catholic hierarchy had done to children did not set [him] free; in fact, it nearly destroyed [his] Christian faith" altogether. Further, "if you reject [the] larger point, then be prepared to welcome the child pornographer and the rogue atom bombmaker to the public square." Setting aside the logistical difficulties inherent in atom bomb construction, no one questions "the larger point," nor does one man's experience make for a compelling argument about the greater good. So, yes, certainly the results of Dreher's investigations hurt him emotionally, and certainly we ought to hide some information out of safety, but neither of those facts seems to be at all relevant to the conclusion Dreher claimed he would argue for.

When he finally does get around to the point, Dreher makes a rather revealing mistake. The question, it appears, comes down to whether one "can plausibly argue that the Catholic Church, or the public, would have been better off had those toxic secrets remained safely locked away." But wait - how did we go from "the greater good" to the good specifically of the Catholic Church? Granted, if Dreher provides this kind of argument with respect to "the public," he would prove his point - but again, why should we think that it benefits the greater good to protect specifically Catholic interests? Unsurprisingly, Dreher fails both to answer this question and to focus whatsoever on the real greater good. Sure, if "[p]eople need the church too much to know the full truth about her," then this conflation makes sense, but Dreher himself says that he never "regret[s his] decision to leave Catholicism for Orthodoxy," which very strongly suggests that people don't need the church. Repeatedly, Dreher collapses religious goods into moral ones, asking, "How much reality must we choose to ignore for the greater good of our own souls, and society?" That these two questions ask wholly different things should be immediately obvious, but Dreher never treats them as such. Only when he tells us things we already know, then, does he succeed in this article. Would it be better for the Catholic church if nobody ever found out about the terrible things they do? Absolutely. Would it be better for anyone else? If one only has Dreher's arguments as a guide, one can only answer, "Absolutely not."

For those lucky few of you who had forgotten about Joe the career-hopping opportunist, forgive me for making your Monday worse than a Monday should be. Here is an email that I received today from good ol' Joe (remember? I took one for the team and signed up for his site) - note the really really bad analogy between personal economic crises and national ones:

"President Obama says “Americans across this country are struggling, and they are watching to see if we’re equal to the task. Let's show them that we are. And let’s do whatever it takes to keep the promise of America alive in our time.”

Lets [sic] break down this one statement down.

“And let's do whatever it takes to keep the promise of America alive in our time”

The problem with this statement is it’s too “Short sighted.” [sic, sic] The simple reason I say this is, “Who will pay for this?” Unfortunately that responsibility will fall to our children and our Grandchildren [sic]. By the year 2030, we, as a country [sic] will be unable to generate enough revenue to pay the interest on our current deficit [sic], let alone pay for this “Stimulus Package” with out [sic] increasing Taxes [sic] drastically in the future [he's right - why haven't we ever considered raising taxes in the past?]. That means our children will not be able to have the same “standards of living” [sic] that we now enjoy.

Plus, saying “let’s do what ever [sic] it takes” smacks of desperation, and that scares me. It also brings me to my next point.

What ever [sic] it takes does not mean we have to spend. I believe in using a little “common sense” here. Whenever I don’t make enough money to pay my bills, I cut things out, such as cable, going out as much, I even use coupons to go shopping with [not sic so much as ow]. Why has no one, and I mean no one, Republican or Democrat said “Hey, instead of all this spending why don’t we cut some FAT out of the government”?????[????????] Lord knows there is plenty that could be cut out.

The answer to that question is two fold [sic]:
1. The special interest groups control our politicians.
2. The American people won’t get off their butts to do anything about it.

And there is the challenge.

Please America, I implore you, Call [sic] your senator, your representative and demand that the Government look at other alternatives before they spend us into a welfare state.

Challenge our politicians to do what is right as opposed to what is expedient.

All the best,
Joe Wurzelbacher"

I have a better idea: call your senators and representatives and ask them to explain to you how reducing government spending could possibly create jobs, especially in the short term. For every person you talk to who says it can't be done, punch Joe in the face. Then, tell us your results, and we'll all be able to say for sure whether or not one can literally beat some sense into someone.